How Instagram caved to celebrity demands from the Kardashians and Taylor Swift

Instagram bent over backwards to please the Kardashians and did a major overhaul of the comments section after they complained about it.

The reality TV stars – who have a combined half a billion Instagram followers – griped to the photo sharing app that their comments on each other’s photos were being buried among those from their fans.

The Kardashians felt that their ‘extra efforts’ to boost each other’s posts should get more attention and Instagram agreed, a new book reveals.

The app’s engineers introduced algorithmic ordering in 2017 meaning that comments from anyone who was a verified celebrity appeared higher.

The claim in No Filter: The Inside Story of Instagram, which is out next week, shows that Instagram has made changes to the app used by more than a billion users at the behest of a handful of its biggest stars – not because the community wanted it.

The book by Bloomberg journalist Sarah Frier also reveals that Taylor Swift got changes made as well after complaining about bullying.

Miley Cyrus was placated when she complained about bullying of LGBT youth by promoting her new album on Instagram and interviewing vulnerable teens – giving her free publicity and a PR coup.

‘No Filter’ charts the rise of Instagram from its launch in 2010 by founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger to its acquisition for $1bn by Facebook in 2012, which at the time was seen as an astronomical sum.

From the outset Instagram courted creatives and artists as a way to promote itself as a luxury brand – the first paid advert was by designer Michael Kors.

Celebrities proved to be a different beast and their first interactions were challenging.

By 2011, Justin Bieber had already amassed 15million Instagram followers and his manager Scooter Braun thought he ‘could get something out of Instagram’, ‘No Filter’ says.

Braun called Systrom while he was driving in a car full of friends to Lake Tahoe in California and told him: ‘I’ve got Justin on the line’.

The two made a pitch which was ‘let Bieber invest or pay him for his content, or else he’d stop using Instagram’.

Systrom refused, Bieber followed through on his threat but his girlfriend at the time Selena Gomez ‘loved’ Instagram and kept posting to the point where he had to reactivate his account.

Thanks to Bieber the use of emojis became common on Instagram to the point where its staff referred to it as ’emoji heaven’.

By 2013 Instagram’s outreach to celebrities had become a deliberate attempt to lure them away from YouTube and Twitter.

It began with a party in Los Angeles at the home of Madonna’s manager Guy Oseary with the help of Ashton Kutcher, an early Instagram evangelist.

Charles Porch, the Facebook celebrity liaison officer who had been assigned to Instagram, offered free consultants to help the stars but they resisted.

Kutcher tells the book that, despite Instagram being an integral part of being a celebrity now, back then ‘trying to sell Hollywood on why this would be valuable was pretty difficult’.

He said that ‘it’s not great for an actor for people to know who you are as a person’ because it makes it harder to be a character’.

Things were not helped by Systrom being clueless such as when one woman at the party asked what Instagram would do if her fans felt they were being bullied.

Systrom said: ‘And what is it that you do?’ It was Ariana Grande – who had 8million followers on Instagram.

A huge milestone for Instagram came when Channing Tatum agreed to post pictures of his baby Everly on the app instead of selling them to a celebrity magazine.

It got more than 200,000 likes and plenty of media coverage – and showed celebrities they could bypass the media to get their message out.

Gradually A-listers began to fall in line and signed up and Instagram began to bend the rules to accommodate them.

In 2015, Miley Cyrus threatened to quit Instagram because it was allowing bullying of LGBT youth.

So Instagram dispatched Porch who said she could promote her new album and share portraits of vulnerable and transgender youth.

Cyrus’ frustration disappeared at the marketing opportunity and she carried on using the app.

Instagram was just as accommodating when Kylie Jenner got into a row over her plump lips.

Fans were doing the ‘Kylie Jenner Lip Challenge’ which involved dangerously sucking shot glasses to make them plump like hers.

Instagram suggested that Kylie interview Instagram users with body related issues and the row immediately went away and was replaced by positive PR about her efforts to combat body shaming.

Taylor Swift was another celebrity for whom Instagram changed the rules after she complained about abuse from Kanye West’s fans.

West had rushed on stage at the 2009 VMA Awards when Swift was accepting the Best Video by a Female Artist award and said that Beyonce should have won it.

West then wrote in his 2016 song ‘Famous’ that ‘I made that b**** famous’, referring to Swift.

That day on National Snake Day Kim Kardashian Tweeted: ‘They have holidays for everybody, I mean everything these days’ followed by 37 snake emojis, a veiled reference to Swift.

On top of that Swift was getting abuse from fans of Calvin Harris, her ex-boyfriend, after she revealed that she had helped write his hit song with Rihanna ‘This Is What You Came For’.

Swift asked Instagram to stop the comments like #taylorswiftisasnake and the slew of snake photos that were being posted on her account.

Systrom wanted to ‘delete all the reptilian vandalism en masse’ but others worried that it would be too obvious.

One employee said you ‘couldn’t make it a tool for a famous person without making it available to everyone else’.

So that’s what they did and they brought in a tool to filter out a specific keyword or emoji.

Instagram framed Swift as a ‘beta tester’ for the product but ‘protected the fact she’s been bothered by the onslaught’ and was the start of the process.

By 2017 the Kardashians were such a force on Instagram they could be even bolder and by that point Kim had become the fifth person in the world to pass 100million users.

No Filter says that the family followed a strict schedule of posting and commenting on each other’s posts every day that started at 5.30 in the morning.

As well as drawing attention to each other’s Instagram accounts it sent a signal to Instagram’s algorithm that each post was important.

The problem was that the public couldn’t see these posts because they kept disappearing under the constant stream of comments from other people.

Instagram came up with a solution which it brought into effect in Spring 2017: algorithmic ordering which put comments from celebrities, people close to the person posting or anyone who was verified with a blue tick up the top.

The book says that they yet again ‘changed the product for everyone based on the feedback of a few’.

No Filter goes into detail about how the Kardashians conquered Instagram and reveals that they stole the playbook from Paris Hilton and then bettered her.

During the 2000s Kim Kardashian was friends with Hilton and watched her build a reality TV empire and a personal brand built around photographs.

Hilton’s manager Jason Moore would pay photographers to take pictures of her then sell them to magazines and split the profits with Hilton.

Moore ‘dismissed’ the idea of Instagram and YouTube using his videos and photos for free because ‘we were used to getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars per photo – why would we do it for free?’

But the Kardashians saw the bigger picture and realized that in the long term they could get paid for promoting things to their massive audience which they built with their TV show and cross pollinated to their social media accounts.

Kris Jenner, the family matriarch, calls it an ‘instant audience ready to join the party’.

Kim now has 164million Instagram followers and gets $1million for a single post. Paris Hilton has 11million followers – and is nowhere near as famous.

Elsewhere No Filter presents Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg in a deeply unflattering light.

When he bought Instagram he promised Systrom that it would be independent but he gave him a ‘reality check’ in 2014 and said they would have to start allowing more ads in.

Zuckerberg presented Systrom with a graph with $1billion of advertising revenue and said he expected him to achieve it.

The book says that while Systrom wanted to do things ‘the best way’ Zuckerberg wanted to do things ‘better than anyone else’.

The differences were apparent when Zuckerberg invited Systrom on a skiing trip and Systrom used an app called Ski Tracks to show him the length of the run and the angle of the slopes.

Zuckerberg asked him: ‘Does it show you top speed?’ – it did.

Zuckerberg said: ‘I’ll beat you down the next hill!’ and left Systrom, who preferred backcountry skiing and enjoying the natural beauty, feeling ‘instantly uncomfortable’.

The book says that Instagram employees felt cheated when the app was sold to Facebook because they got nothing while Systrom and Krieger got $400million.

Reports at the time said that each of the 13 Instagram employees were worth $77million each but in fact some had to trade in their Instagram stock for Facebook stock.

They hoped that Systrom would give them $1million each from his $400million fortune but he refused.

In one case a staffer was banned from taking her dog to work at their new office on Facebook’s campus – and had to start paying for a dog walker.

In another chapter, No Filter reveals that the tweet by Ellen DeGeneres at the Oscars in 2014 was completely premeditated.

During rehearsal DeGeneres saw a seat with Meryl Streep’s name in the third row and thought she should do her selfie with her.

Executives from Samsung heard her talking about this in rehearsal and asked if she could do it with a Samsung phone instead of her iPhone.

The morning of the Oscars she was presented with a tray of Samsung options and the resulting Tweet was retweeted by more than 3million people – a new record at the time – and left Instagram and Facebook fuming.