Instagram rolls out hidden likes in the US
There are more meaningful ways to promote mental well-being though.
Welcome to the first Daily Reader from This Should Help, a business newsletter for the creative class — written by me, Michael Jones. Send your feedback to michael@bymichaeljones.com and subscribe to get exclusive news and views creativity’s relationship with business, technology and pop culture that help you work and live on your own terms.
Last week, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri made news at WIRED25 when he announced the popular social media platform would start hiding likes on the profiles of American users beginning today. The private-likes experiment launched in Canada this past April before expanding to seven additional countries in July.
If you use the platform but are unsure how the test will work, here’s what to expect: You’ll be able to see your own likes by tapping on the list of people who’ve liked it. Your friends, however, won’t be able to see how many likes your post has received.
“The idea is to try to depressurize Instagram, make it less of a competition and give people more space to focus on connecting with the people they love and things that inspire them,” Mosseri said. “We’ll have to see how it affects how people feel about the platform, how it affects how they use the platform [and] how it affects the creator ecosystem.”
Engagement is the currency of the influencer economy, with A-list creators like earning up to $10,000 for a single post, which has many wondering how the experiment will impact their bottom line. (I write more about the influencer reaction to the hidden-likes experiment in tomorrow’s Daily Reader.)
As for his own company’s bottom line, Mosseri said the priority is on user well-being than revenue. Additional tools are in the works — with input from therapists and engineers — to prevent and de-escalate bullying on the platform. “We’re going to put a 15-year-old kid’s interests before a public speaker’s interest. When we look at the world of public content, we’re going to put people in that world before organizations and corporations.” One possibility: Making users take a break when they need it. Whatever that means.
This newfound altruism runs counter to Instagram’s entire business model, which relies on those same organizations and corporations buying ads targeted to the same 15-year-olds that are browsing the platform. If users are “taking a break,” then how will they be able to scroll past the chic Warby Parker eyeglasses and Red Bull activations being marketed to them? We’ll come back to this in a moment though.
“Tech companies like Instagram didn’t create mental illness, perfectionism, mindless, comparison or mindless consumption. But they did do a few other things that are worth the scrutiny.”
For now, we can agree that mental health is an issue that requires meaningful awareness and action from tech companies, media institutions and all levels of our government.
According to research published by Jean Twenge, PhD, in the Journal of Abnormal Psychology, major depressive episodes spiked 52 percent for 12 to 17 year-olds between 2005 and 2017. In people ages 18 to 25, depression rose 63 percent. And young adults affected by “serious psychological distress,” which the Centers for Disease and Control define as “mental health problems severe enough to cause moderate-to-serious impairment in social, occupational or school functioning and to require treatment,” were up 71 percent.
Perhaps worst of all: The rate of 18 to 19 year-olds who had suicidal thoughts, plans or attempts increased 46 percent. Respondents to this study expressed nervousness, hopelessness, restlessness or fidgeting, and such sadness and depression that “nothing could cheer [them] up. Women and girls, who are already living with often-unrealistic expectations on how they should work, live and look, are at particular risk of mood disorders. In addition to social media, rising workloads, limited staff and resources, and long hours have caused three out of four Gen Zers to leave a job for mental health reasons.
Tech companies like Instagram didn’t create mental illness, perfectionism, mindless, comparison or mindless consumption. But they did do a few other things that are worth the scrutiny I’m about to deliver.
“If we knew upfront that [social media] business models relied on making money from how we moved and grooved across the internet, we would’ve immediately called BS and demanded the powers that be held accountable.”
First, let’s start with “surveillance capitalism,” a term coined by Shoshana Zuboff, professor emerita at Harvard Business School, to describe “the unilateral claiming of private human experience as free raw material for translation into behavioral data.” This data, Zuboff explains, is “then computed and packaged as prediction products and sold into behavioral futures markets — business customers with a commercial interest in knowing what we will do now, soon, and later.” Google was the first company to capture “surplus behavioral data — more than what they needed for services” — even though “right from the start at Google it was understood that users were unlikely to agree to this unilateral claiming of their experience and its translation into behavioral data.”
In other words, if we knew upfront that Google’s business model relied on making money from how we moved and grooved across the internet, we would’ve immediately called bullshit and demanded the powers that be held accountable. (Kinda like we’re doing now…) But as Zuboff explains, “From the start, the logic reflected the social relations of the one-way mirror. [Google was] able to see and take — and do this in a way that we could not contest because we had no way to know what was happening. When we caught on, we had already shaped our lives to bend to the whims of the #algorithm.
Facebook, who owns Instagram and What’s App, took the baton from Google, going on to design addictive platforms and apps that we didn’t necessarily need — and don’t offer any intrinsic value — while influencing oblivious consumers to casually splinter their time and attention (all to avoid “missing out” on a viral meme, celebrity beef or family photo) so they would have a product to sell to advertisers. It’s this business model that makes me feel so skeptical of these companies (and one of many reasons I quit social media nearly two years ago). Users don’t pay for a platform that must be monetized to satisfy investors and shareholders. As long as attention is what butters the bread, feature updates or messaging campaigns that exclude weaning users off these platforms altogether will always fall short.
The outrage that sustains American news cycles is fueled by a media industry that, save for a few publications, operates the same ad-supported model as Facebook and Google. The difference between tech companies and media companies like Condé Nast or Hearst, two companies I worked for in a previous life, is that the tech companies have all the data so they can offer cheaper, better targeting capabilities which offer advertisers a greater return on investment — even if it incentivizes clickbait, outrage and distraction.
“The difference between tech companies and media companies is that the tech companies have all the data so they can offer cheaper, better targeting capabilities which offer advertisers a greater return on investment — even if it incentivizes clickbait, outrage and distraction.”
It was never supposed to be this way though.
I remember when I first discovered the internet. What used to feel like a private, solitary escape to a far-off galaxy to indulge my curiosities for my own personal satisfaction rapidly evolved into a communal linchpin of everyday life that demanded perpetual performance and public displays of identity. I won’t speak for you, but I used to go to the internet to supplement my offline pursuits; now the internet is a constant companion for navigating the possibilities and pitfalls of the new economy.
The shift occurred when platforms like Google and Facebook (and later Twitter and Instagram) became so dominant that they were, as Cal Newport writes in his New York Times bestseller Deep Work, “inextricably intertwined into the fabric of the internet.”
But there’s a distinction between the social internet and social media. The first, according to Newport, “enables connection, learning and expression.” The second “describes the attempt of a small number of large companies to monetize these capabilities inside walled-garden monopoly platforms.”
I believe this explains why people assume I’m anti-tech or anti-internet because I’m anti-social media. Social media profit from surveillance capitalism, often to our detriment, which is why platforms like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter offer infinite streams of news, entertainment and opinion, thereby attempting to redesign the internet into a hyperactive universe of distraction engineered to exploit our time and attention. And in most people’s eyes, “to criticize social media, therefore, [is] to criticize the internet’s general ability to do useful things like connect people, spread information, and support activism and expression,” Newport writes.
Hiding likes or de-escalating bullying or rooting out hate speech are probably good-faith intentions for Instagram. My inherently optimistic worldview informs my notion that it’s never too late to course-correct. But at the end of the day, Instagram will still spin the wheels on a cycle that sells your attention, whether you’re good, bad, happy or sad — which is a reality that’s hiding in plain sight.