Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced Friday at Wired25 that the platform will begin hiding “like” counts on posts, according to Business Insider.
Instagram has been rolling out the removal of likes in 7 different countries so The United States could be next.
There are four types of engagements one can take on an Instagram post. Like, Comment, Save and Share, with the act of ‘liking’ a post being the least significant of them all.
Think about it for a minute, liking a picture takes .02 seconds, all we have to do is double tap a photo and move on. Commenting, sharing and saving are all engagements that take time and more thought on the users end. Therefore, by removing likes, Instagram is encouraging more genuine, authentic engagement between users.
“Removing ‘likes’ on Instagram is encouraging more genuine, authentic engagement between users”
-Christy Barre
A few months ago, a young college student reached out to me via DM on Instagram and mentioned feeling ‘insecure because she doesn’t have many followers as some of the other girls’. My heart sunk.
Instagram explained:
We want your friends to focus on the photos and videos you share, not how many likes they get.
Instagram
We, as a human race, should not give any social platform that amount of energy to be-little ourselves. Yet, studies suggest that there is a direct correlation between our social media numbers and our self-esteem.
The amount of followers we have or the amount of ‘likes’ we get do NOT determine our self-worth as human beings at our core.
With the removal of likes by Instagram, we will be unable to publicly see the amount of ‘likes’ our friend’s post gets which will ideally reduce the amount of comparison on Instagram’s platform helping our society’s overall mental health.