Meta AI drives double-digit Instagram engagement growth while facing addiction lawsuits

Meta is bragging about how its AI keeps people on Instagram, while facing lawsuits over addiction

Serving tech enthusiasts for over 25 years. TechSpot means tech analysis and advice you can trust. Ripple effect: Social media addiction has been a subject of public debate for years, but time spent on apps like TikTok and Instagram keeps climbing. Meta has now confirmed it's using AI to personalize the Instagram feed, and that shift is driving a sharp increase in the amount of time users spend on the platform. During its Q2 2026 earnings call, Meta said its latest Reels ranking update, the largest one to date, drove a 15-basis-point increase in Instagram sessions. The number of "reshares" has also increased significantly, suggesting the app is doing a better job of surfacing content users actually want to see. Speaking to investors and analysts, CFO Susan Li explained that the algorithm is specifically designed to track the type of videos people watch on Instagram and recommend similar content, keeping people hooked to the app. According to Li, the algorithm now offers more personalized content than ever, giving users more direct control over what they see. Li added that the AI algorithm now allows Instagram to recommend newer content to users, with its largest models identifying high-quality Reels the moment they're created. She noted that more than 50% of the recommended content in users' feeds is now less than a day old, more than double what it was a year ago. During the quarter, Meta also deployed its "Muse" family of LLMs to better classify content by topic and tone. Li said the company has already benefited from the new models across all its platforms and is now developing next-generation recommendation algorithms designed to power both organic content and targeted advertising. But even as Meta touts the effectiveness of its AI algorithms in keeping users engaged, the company is facing multiple lawsuits alleging that it deliberately designs its recommendations to make its platforms addictive to teens and young adults, harming their mental health and contributing to a marked increase in anxiety, depression, and social isolation among its most loyal users. Meta was sued by 40 US states for allegedly breaking their consumer protection laws and fueling a youth mental health crisis by encouraging teens to spend excessive time on its platforms. The lawsuits allege that, in pursuit of greater profits, Meta ignored internal studies indicating Instagram could harm teenagers' mental health.

Meta says its AI is making you spend more time on Instagram

Time on the app grew by double digits last quarter, Meta says, driven by more personalised recommendations, even as the company faces lawsuits over exactly that design. Meta says people are spending more time on Instagram, and it credits its artificial intelligence for the increase. Global time spent on the app grew by double digits year on year in the second quarter, the company told investors, driven by AI-tuned recommendations in the main feed and in Reels. The gains are specific enough to be measured. Meta said a reworked Reels system lifted sessions by 15 basis points, a small-sounding figure that, across billions of users, translates into a meaningful amount of extra attention captured. The pattern holds across Meta's apps. Video time has surged on both Instagram and Facebook, the company said, as short-form recommendations pull users from the feeds they follow toward an endless stream the algorithm assembles for them. Mark Zuckerberg described the change as more personal, not just more. "Our recommendations are also becoming more personalized, surfacing more fresh content while giving people more direct control over what they see," he said, pairing the engagement gains with a nod to user choice. The technical shift underneath is notable. Zuckerberg said Reels now combines faster inference with a new architecture that draws on a deeper history of what each user has done, letting the system predict more accurately what will keep them watching. Meta has also turned large language models loose on its own feed. The company now runs every public Reel and post through an LLM to analyse its topic and tone, which Zuckerberg called "a key building block toward greater personalization," with plans to extend it to Facebook. The purpose is plain enough. Understanding content more deeply lets Meta match it more precisely to each viewer, and more precise matching means more time spent, the metric on which its advertising business ultimately rests. That is where the achievement becomes uncomfortable. The same design Meta celebrates as personalisation is the one that regulators and litigants describe as engineered compulsion, especially where younger users are concerned. The lawsuits are not abstract. Meta booked a $2.4 billion legal charge in the quarter, and a group of US states is pressing claims that its products are built to keep young people hooked, litigation that turns "time spent" from a boast into evidence. Meta's answer is that control comes with the engagement. Executives point to settings that let users tune their own algorithms and to teen-specific protections rolled out across its apps, arguing that more personalisation need not mean less agency. Critics see the two claims as hard to hold together. A system optimised to maximise time spent, they argue, is not neutral about what a user "chooses," and the controls sit on top of an engine designed to keep people scrolling. For the business, though, the direction is unambiguous. Engagement is the raw material of Meta's ad machine, and anything that reliably lifts it, especially AI that does so at scale, is exactly what the company has been spending tens of billions to build. More time also means more inventory. Every extra minute of scrolling is another slot Meta can sell to advertisers, which is why engagement gains translate so directly into the revenue that funds everything else. It also helps explain the spending. Meta's enormous AI capex is often framed around future agents and superintelligence, but the clearest near-term payoff is this, a recommendation system that already measurably increases how long people stay. The tension will follow Meta into court and onto the balance sheet. The AI that lifts engagement is both its best answer to investors asking where the returns are and its worst evidence in cases asking whether those returns come at users' expense. For now, the number is going up. People are spending more time on Instagram, Meta knows exactly why, and the same fact that reassures Wall Street is the one its opponents intend to use against it.

Meta used AI to make your Instagram feed harder to quit

Meta says its latest AI recommendation sytems are keeping people on Instagram longer by serving up more relevant Reels and Feed posts. Caught yourself scrolling on Instagram a lot longer lately? You're not imagining it. Meta just told investors what's driving that trend, and AI is at the center of it. During its second-quarter earnings call, Meta said time spent on Instagram grew by double digits year over year after rolling out new AI-powered recommendation systems. According to the company, the biggest gains came from improvements to how it recommends Reels and other public content, making it easier to surface videos people are more likely to watch. Every public post gets an AI read first Meta's recommendation systems now do more than track likes or watch time. According to Chief Financial Officer Susan Li, Meta has trained large language models to read what a Reel or Feed post is actually about, down to its topic and tone, and pair that understanding with a deeper read on each user's viewing history to predict what they'll watch next. Li said Meta hit a milestone earlier this year, when every public Reel and Feed post on Instagram started getting automatically processed through an LLM. The company is extending the same process to more parts of Facebook, and it has also started using a separate model family, called Muse, to analyze videos for automatic topic classification and summarization. Recommended Videos This implementation appears to have worked in Meta's favor. Li said Meta's largest single Reels ranking update to date drove a 15 basis point increase in sessions, with the biggest gains in reshares and time spent. Meta is now rolling the same approach out to the main Feed. Better recommendations mean stickier feeds For Meta, this AI-based approach makes sense. Better recommendations keep people on the app for longer, help creators reach bigger audiences, and create more room for ads. For Instagram users, the implications are harder to ignore. The better the platform gets at predicting what you'll watch next, the harder it becomes to stop scrolling.