Instagram will hide for a small portion of its US users the number of "likes" collected by content posted from next week, in the wake of similar tests in other countries, to reduce the social pressure on the network .
"We have tested the possibility of making 'likes' private in several countries, we are extending these tests to a small portion of people in the US next week, and we can not wait to see the feedback," tweeted Friday. Adam Mosseri, head of the mobile platform owned by Facebook, focused on sharing photos and videos. Instagram, very popular among young people, had begun to mask the "likes" in May in Canada, then in six countries (Australia, Italy, Ireland, Japan, Brazil, New Zealand) in July, assuring to want to reduce the stress in its users after reviews about the risks of the application for mental health.
Affected users will no longer be able to see how much "I like" they are getting from others. They will still be able to see the number of "likes" on their own posts but by clicking on a different page. During testing, the network owned by US giant Facebook had specified that the measurement tools of companies using the platform to promote their products were not affected. Instagram has more than one billion users worldwide.
"We do not want Instagram to feel like a competition"
"We're doing this because we want our users to focus on shared photos and videos, not the number of 'likes' they collect," an Instagram spokeswoman said in July. "We do not want Instagram to feel like a competition."
A study conducted in the United States in 2018 by the Pew Research Center showed that 72% of teenagers in the country used Intagram and that nearly 40% of them felt compelled to share only content that had collected a lot of "likes". "or comments. Facebook also plans to no longer publicly display the number of mentions "likes" or "likes" harvested by the contents.