Instagram head Adam Mosseri on Friday addressed the moderation issues that saw Instagram and Threads users losing access to their accounts, having posts disappear, and more saying that the company "found mistakes" it's attributing to human moderators. Interestingly, the company didn't point the initial blame to faulty AI systems, as most would have assumed.

In a post on Threads, Mosseri mentioned the issue that has been nagging these social platforms in the past few days as follows; The mistakes it has found so far were due to content reviewers – people, not automated systems – "making calls without being provided the context on how conversations played out, which was a miss.".

The exec said Instagram was fixing the issues so the reviewers could make better calls and make fewer mistakes.

In a reply to a comment on the thread, he also clarified that, of course, Instagram knew that reviewers need context and that "one of the tools we built broke, and so it wasn't showing them sufficient context."

"That's on us," he said.

It doesn't seem to explain why the accounts of users were tagged with anyone's name with belonging to a user under 13 years old, and then disabled. How would a human moderator have assumed that? Even after a user has given an ID to prove they are above 13 years old, their account was being disabled according to a report of The Verge.

Reached for comment on the story, Instagram said not all the problems that users had experienced were in relation to human moderators and their mistakes. The firm also pointed to the tool breakage and said the issues around things like flagging users as underage are still under investigation.

Instagram does not know that it will ever have an explanation for each of the issues, we realize, for there may be a million things going on.

In addition to their accounts being disabled, others had witnessed downranking or spam marking of their posts even though they were an actual reputable person or somebody with a huge following, not a spammer.

For example, ex-Wall Street Journal tech columnist Walt Mossberg said that within 24 hours his engagement on Threads had fallen to zero. What used to range between 100 and 1,000 likes on his posts plummeted to 0-20, he reported from Threads. 

Matt Navarra, who is no slouch social media strategist in his own right, added that the moderation problems are exacerbated by the users' own statements that their follower growth rate and engagement is "falling off a cliff."

Social networking site startup Bluesky also capitalized on the chaos on the site to push disgruntled users towards the platform by creating an account on Threads and sharing its features and updates.

"We're trying to provide a safer experience, and we need to do better," Mosseri said. He ended his post with a message that suggests the problem may not fully be resolved, adding, "Thanks for your patience and keep the feedback coming."