Social Media Affects Us More Than We Would Like to Think
Katie Vastola and Moira Sirois
counts. Photo courtesy of CNN.
Many people, consumed by social media, constantly check numbers: numbers of likes, comments, and followers.
Due to this reality in many users’ lives, Instagram has tried to remedy the situation. Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri recently announced the platform would start to test hiding like counts on posts.
Business Insider says that, since July, Instagram has tested this feature in seven countries: Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand.
While this new feature bars others from seeing your like counts, you can still privatley view your likes. Mosseri announced to BuzzFeed that eliminating likes was about “creating a less pressurized environment where people feel comfortable expressing themselves.”
Instagram is not the first platform to try this. Facebook, which owns Instagram, experimented with disabling like-counts in September, and Twitter has been mentioning it for a year.
Likes tend to control what we post and how we perceive others. We post certain pictures because we think they will get more likes than others. If we see someone whose picture has a lot of likes, we view that person as more popular. When someone has less likes on a post, they are perceived as being less popular.
“Likes make you feel pressured to get a higher amount and if you do not, you are more prone to take [the post] down,” said Sophomore Jackson Hoover.
Instagram has also been said to lower self-esteem, as likes can influence people’s perceptions of themselves.
Everybody has seen a picture on Instagram that makes them feel insecure because the person in the picture has a ‘perfect’ body. If that picture has a lot of likes, it is more likely to make the viewer insecure.
“[Hiding likes] would make me feel less pressured when posting,” said Sophomore Casey Jackson. “I would not have a number of how many people ‘like’ me compared to how many people ‘like’ the other people.”
This is a positive effect of hiding likes, but still being able to view your own like counts might still have an impact on users’ mental health.
Even though we try to say that we do not post pictures just to get a lot of likes, if that were true, we would not actually care about the likes being hidden. When a post gets a lot of likes, we feel good about ourselves; but when it gets fewer likes, it makes us feel bad. Would not allowing others to see the amount of likes on your post take away the urge to delete posts that do not have so many likes?
If the results of this test are strong enough to urge Instagram extend the feature, hopefully the stress and pressure brought on by social media will be alleviated.
