Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announced Friday that the photo-sharing platform would start hiding “like” counts on some U.S. users’ posts starting next week, Wired reports.
Under the switch, the affected U.S. users will be able to see the amount of “likes” their own posts get, but they won’t be able to see how many likes their followers or other platform users get on their posts. Others’ metrics will be private, Mosseri said.
“It’s about young people,” he said, adding that he hoped the new feature would help “depressurize Instagram [and] make it less of a competition.”
WATCH: Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri announces that the platform will start hiding likes for US audiences starting next week. It’s the latest step in Instagram’s quest to become the safest place on the internet. https://t.co/BGkMG57rdk #WIRED25 pic.twitter.com/WNTyAPVhaD
— WIRED (@WIRED) November 9, 2019
While some have applauded the move as a way to take reduce the pressure of social media, others say hiding the engagement metrics will create a slew of other issues, including making it harder to determine which accounts have legitimate followers.
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The move is also bound to affect the rise of influencers, whose ability to make money promoting products goes hand-in-hand with the amount of engagement their posts receive.
The experiment comes after the company tested hiding “like” counts in other places, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Japan, Italy, Ireland and Brazil, the outlet notes.
Instagram isn’t the only social media platform experimenting with public engagement data: YouTube, Twitter and Facebook — which owns Instagram — have also played around with removing similar public metrics from their platforms.
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