Instagram is one of Australia’s most popular social media platforms. Almost two in three Aussies have an account.
Ushering in 2026 and what he calls “synthetic everything” on our feeds, Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri has signalled the platform will likely adjust its algorithms to surface more original content instead of AI slop.
Finding ways to tackle widespread AI content is the latest in a long series of shifts Instagram has undergone over the past decade. Some are obvious and others are more subtle. But all affect user experience and behaviour, and, more broadly, how we see and understand the online social world.
To identify some of these patterns, I examined ten years’ worth of Instagram posts from a single account (@australianassociatedpress) for an upcoming study.
This involved looking at nearly 2,000 posts and more than 5,000 media assets. I selected the AAP account as an example of a noteworthy Australian account with public service value.
I found six key shifts over this timeframe. Although user practices vary, this analysis provides a glimpse into some larger ways the AAP account – and social media more broadly – has been changing in the past decade.
Reflecting on some of these changes also provides hints at how social media might change in the future, and what that means for society.
1. Media orientations have shifted
When it launched in 2010, Instagram quickly became known as the platform that re-popularised the square image format. Square photography has been around for more than 100 years but its popularity waned in the 1980s when newer cameras made the non-square rectangular format dominant.
Instagram forced users to post square images for the platform’s first five years. However, the balance between square and horizontal images has given way to vertical media over time.
On the AAP account that shift happened over the last two years, with 84.4% of all its posts now in vertical orientation.
T.J. Thomson
2. Media types have changed
As with orientations, the media types being posted have also changed. This is due, in part, to platform affordances: what the platform allows or enables a user to do.
As an example, Instagram didn’t allow users to post videos until 2013, three years after the platform started. It added the option to post “stories” (short-lived image/video posts of up to 15 seconds) and live broadcasts in 2016. Reels (longer-lasting videos of up to 90 seconds) came later in 2020.
Some accounts are more video-heavy than others, to try to compete with other video-heavy platforms such as YouTube and TikTok. But we can see a larger trend in the shift from single-image posts to multi-asset posts. Instagram calls these “carousels”, a feature introduced in 2017.
The AAP went from publishing just single-image posts in the first years of the account to gradually using more carousels. In the most recent year, they accounted for 85.9% of all posts.
T.J. Thomson
3. Media are becoming more multimodal
A typical Instagram account grid from the mid-2000s had a mix of carefully curated photographs that were clean, colourful and simple in composition.
Fast-forward a decade, and posts have become much more multimodal. Text is being overlaid on images and videos and the compositions are mixing media types more frequently.
@australianassociatedpress
