Instagram Is Putting In Mandatory Ad Breaks, If People Want To Waste Their Time On Instagram Let Them

Artur Widak. Shutterstock Images.

NY Post- Instagram wants to force you to stop doomscrolling — in a way users are not happy with.

The social media platform is testing “ad breaks” that will make the user stop and look at an ad for a certain period of time before they can continue scrolling.

Some users have taken to X, formerly Twitter, and Reddit to report that they have seen the feature on their accounts, and Instagram spokesperson Matthew Tye confirmed to The Verge that the test is indeed happening.

Meta’s Instagram already shows sponsored ads and posts within the content you’re scrolling through on both the home feed and reels — but the unskippable ads, similar to YouTube’s platform, can be disruptive, and some users are calling it “garbage.”

Listen, I get it. Scrolling social media is likely bad for you. We're all victims of it. You sit down on a chair and before you know it you have wasted an hour or two of your time. Everything we see on there is bad for us. It's all the perfect scenario of people's lives, breathtaking photos, and other snapshots of things that either make you mad or insecure. Models, influencers, etc. Yet we all still eat up these apps like fools. 

While we know scrolling and even having these apps is bad for us, I remind you this is a free country and if people want to waste their time for hours scrolling the app, they are entitled to do that. Instagram trying to limit that by putting on mandatory ads seems unAmerican, and counter productive to why everyone loves the app in the first place … it's addictive. The.whole reason why we're on this app is because it's addictive, let us be addicted and get out of the way. 

If they start making us watching ads on Instagram what's next? Limiting how many times we can tweet during one game? Making us shut our phones off all together at some point in the day? I totally understand this stuff if bad for us, but the cat is already out of the bag.The toothpaste ain't going back in the bottle. Let us be addicted to social media without restrictions the way this country was intended to be.