• Meta ran an ad touting Muse could let you see who unfollowed you on Instagram.
• Instagram has long prevented its users from doing that. Meta has since removed the ad.
• This shows a complicated tension for Meta between the goals of AI agents and its social media platforms.

Muse, the AI agent from Meta, can do many wonderful and useful things. It can help organize your inbox, book travel plans for you, and buy you lunch.

But one thing that Meta has decided it shouldn't brag about is that it can track who unfollowed you on Instagram.

About a week ago, Rachel Karten, who writes the excellent marketing newsletter Link in Bio, noticed a strange ad on Instagram. The ad encouraged people to download Muse, with an image of the fuzzy mascot holding up red and green Tinder-esque signs, suggesting you could "See who unfollowed you each week."

Finding out who unfollowed you on Instagram is something people have wanted to know since the app first launched. But Instagram — for good reasons — has avoided making this a feature on its own app.

I reached out to Meta to ask about this seeming clash, and a Meta spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider that the ad had been removed and is no longer active in the Meta ad library.

Instagram doesn't want you to know your unfollows

Here's the tension: Instagram knows that people want this feature, but it also knows it would be bad for the platform's vibes.

Instagram head Adam Mosseri regularly does AMAs on his personal account, and he's answered questions about why there's no "who unfollowed me" feature. His reasoning (gone from his page but have been aggregated in other videos) is that they want to make people feel comfortable unfollowing people they're no longer interested in.

To most people, it is obvious that this feature could hurt people's feelings, especially younger users (let's assume that Instagram does care about teen users' feelings here, although I understand if you have some hesitations on that). Feeling bad while using the platform is a bad user experience!

It's also ultimately bad for Instagram. If you're reluctant to unfollow accounts you don't like, then you'll end up with a feed that's less compelling, and you'll end up opening Instagram less often or spending less time on it. That's bad for Instagram's daily active user metrics!

Yes, Muse can actually do this

There are, and have been, third-party services that can track who unfollows you. These sometimes require access to your login info in ways I definitely wouldn't recommend, and can track over time who has unfollowed you. So it's not like Muse is doing something totally novel or unheard of here.

I asked Muse to do this for me, and it said it could — with a caveat: it will start tracking my follow lists to see who unfollows me going forward, but it can't retroactively check who unfollowed me in the past (that's mostly the same as the other trackers). And honestly? I don't want to know! No thanks! Yikes!

Is this just one stupid ad? Yes. Was it set up and run as an ad by someone at Meta far removed from Instagram's philosophy on unfollows? Probably. Is it the most shocking news in the world if Meta runs a single ad and then takes it down? No.

But this interests me so much because it gets at a bigger and thornier issue. AI agents like Muse are what Meta clearly sees as the future of the company and how people use its services. But AI agents' abilities and use cases may be at odds with the nature of social media.

In the simplest way, AI agents are supposed to help you be efficient and get things done. Social media is supposed to help you waste your time.

These are two vastly different objectives — and it's going to be interesting to see how these two new technological pillars of Meta clash or complement each other.

Already, we have one Meta product (Muse) that is more than happy to do something that another Meta product (Instagram) has long discouraged.

There are plenty of other features that people want to do on social media, but Instagram and Facebook don't allow because it's bad for the overall health of the platforms. Suddenly, AI agents like Muse can do these long-forbidden things. The question is: how far is Meta willing to cannibalize the health of its own social platforms for the sake of growing its AI?

• Have an AI agent? Need a hammer? Home Depot is thinking about how to make that palatable for the retailer.
• Angie Brown, the company's CIO, spoke to Business Insider about agents, the PHP cyber scramble, and AI fixes.
• She also talked about Home Depot's involvement in Project Glasswing, which grants access to Anthropic's Mythos Preview.

Home Depot wants to roll out the welcome mat for your AI agent — so long as it's wearing a name tag and acting on your behalf.

During a sit-down interview with Business Insider, Angie Brown, the company's executive vice president and chief information officer, said the retailer wants to support AI agents that can search and buy products on a customer's behalf. But Home Depot needs to be sure of two things first.

"We want to know you're not a bot, and we actually want to know if it's you," she said. "That's something that Muse is working on right now, to self-identify."

Her comments are the latest glimpse into how legacy retailers — and their tech staff — are thinking about the possible next generation of online shopping.

Recently, several Silicon Valley companies have launched consumer-focused AI agents, such as Meta's Muse and Spear Street Technology's Instinct AI. They promise agents capable of scanning the internet, comparing products, filling carts, and buying items with little to no intervention from the person who sent them.

Their rollout has been met with varying levels of resistance and buy-in from online retailers. Amazon barred Muse from shopping on its marketplace, saying the bots didn't properly identify themselves. Several other retailers — including Walmart, Best Buy, Sephora, and Shopify — have announced integrations or openness to AI agents. In October, Meta announced that it co-developed a personal agent protocol with Sierra AI to standardize AI agent identification.

Brown said Home Depot is open to the idea of AI agents, but the retailer doesn't want to lose its connection with loyal customers.

Frequent Home Depot shoppers, such as contractors and remodelers, are part of the company's Pro Rewards platform, where they're eligible for discounts. The retailer doesn't "want to lose contact with the customer," she said.

"That's the next evolution," Brown added, confirming that Home Depot is in active conversations with Meta about how Muse should introduce itself to websites. "There's openness on both sides, because they want it to grow."

Home Depot is already using AI to defend itself

Brown said Home Depot is deploying AI amid a recent wave of cybersecurity worries.

Last week, companies around the world raced to patch critical vulnerabilities in PHP, a programming language used in an estimated 70% of websites. The flaws were discovered with help from OpenAI and prompted US cybersecurity officials to urge affected organizations to update their systems or, in some cases, take them offline.

Brown, whose remit includes Home Depot's cybersecurity, called the hours after the warning a "little hectic," but said the company's main website was not affected.

"We had a couple of operating units — companies we've bought and things like that that are a little bit smaller — that had to plug a few vulnerabilities," she said, including an internal job application system that was taken down "in the middle of the day for about an hour to patch."

Otherwise, she said, the company was largely spared from the sudden tech anxieties.

Home Depot, Brown confirmed to Business Insider, has joined Anthropic's Project Glasswing, an initiative that gives selected companies access to Claude Mythos Preview to help secure critical software. She said the company was not granted access in the project's first wave, "despite our best efforts, and calling a lot of friends." Those slots were largely reserved for banks and cybersecurity firms, not major retailers.

The Anthropic models "found a few things" for Home Depot to fix in its code — but the agents also found a few "false positives," Brown said.

Home Depot, she said, has long ranked cybersecurity vulnerabilities, but AI is leading the company to rethink its desired time to deploy a fix.

"The speed to fix a vulnerability has to be driven down to hours," she said.

• Meta says that over a quarter of Muse users made purchases with the AI agent.
• The average order was over $200 — that's a lot of clams!
• If this is you, please tell me what you're using it for.

Something just blew my mind, and I'm asking for your help to figure it out.

According to Meta's Q3 earnings call on Wednesday, more than a quarter of Muse users so far have used the AI agent make purchases — and the average order size is over $200.

I'll say that again: average order size over $200.

This is shocking to me, and I'm someone who has been actively and happily using Muse for a variety of things. I've been perfectly happy to give Muse access to my email, my calendar, my credit cards, and even my Apple health data.

But I've been slightly reticent about using it to actually buy stuff. Not that I'm totally worried about it getting stuff wrong (although the one purchase I did try to make with it was to order a salad for lunch, and it attempted to place the order on my HSA card after I failed to recognize the last 4 digits of that card, oops).

I think it's more I enjoy shopping online myself? I mean, for most things, I suppose. For "fun" stuff like clothes or personal items, I enjoy browsing and the hit of dopamine when you check out. (Others take this to the extreme, using "dopamine sites" that let you browse fake restaurants and "order" food that never arrives.) The other night I ordered — on a real site — cotton balls, razor blade refills, a plain white t-shirt, and a pair of scissors from the Target app while watching TV and even that boring purchase with a total under $30 gave me a small thrill. Why would I want to cede that joy to AI?

I understand, however, that not all purchases are fun. My colleague, Peter Kafka, used Muse to help him place an order for a new washing machine — the kind of purchase that is difficult to decide on, not particularly fun or exciting to make, and fairly expensive. Things like plane tickets, washing machines, or car insurance are in that category of stuff you have to buy, cost a lot of money, are fairly complicated to decide which option to buy, but bring very little joy during checkout.

I can understand why you might want to hand that off to an AI agent.

If you are using Muse to place big $$$ orders, what the heck are you buying?

My best guess here is that people are using Muse for airplane flights and hotels — the kind of big dollar items that are kind of annoying to book yourself, and you care mainly about just booking the right dates.

Am I right? You tell me!

Comment below, or you can email me at: knotopoulos@businessinsider.com. Or, you know, tell your Muse to email me.

We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history. As more and more AI applications have become available, people have turned to them to seek advice, build businesses, express ideas, learn, and improve their health and quality of life. Nowhere is this more clear than in Asia. AI is already turbocharging small businesses […]

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