Instagram's real motivation for hiding likes

I knew there was an underlying reason behind the company's focus on mental well-being.

In the first Daily Reader published by this newsletter last month, I wrote an analysis of Instagram’s new hidden-likes policy. Of the product update, Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri said at the time, “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.”

Observers immediately wondered how this would affect his company’s bottom line, but Mosseri said the priority is on well-being over revenue — before he went on to cite additional tools that are in the works 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.” The company is reportedly floating the possibility of “making users take a break when they need it.” 🤷🏾‍♂️

To be clear, I don’t disagree that Instagram has an interest in depressurizing its product for young people. Still, I expressed skepticism in the inaugural newsletter at the notion that there was no underlying business motivation for a move that would have immediate business implications:

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?

Turns out, my skepticism was warranted, according to a report by Salvador Rodriguez published to CNBC today. According to Rodriguez, “There’s also a hypothesis within [Instagram] that hiding likes will increase the number of posts people make to the service, by making them feel less self-conscious when their posts don’t get much engagement, three former employees told CNBC.” When asked about its motives for the change by CNBC, Instagram declined to comment.

Social media doesn’t exist to serve you

Capitalism requires CEOs to serve their shareholders, investors and customers (for big tech companies, the third group usually comprises its advertisers). Most consumers and creators of social media fall into none of those groups though. And because most social media products are free for users to enjoy, tech companies have little to no incentive to prioritize the interests of its free users over those of the shareholders, investors or advertisers who are funding the business.

I’ve dedicated considerable space in this newsletter to questioning the intrinsic value that Instagram and its contemporaries offer creators and consumers. There is, however, no debate when it comes to the excellent value Instagram offers to its advertisers. Businesses can microtarget their dream customers with extraordinary precision and interrupt consumers with promotional messages that cost a fraction of traditional mediums like TV and print. It’s foolish to expect businesses to ignore this opportunity, even if it’s at the expense of the mental well-being of consumers and the financial well-being of creators.

Once Instagram achieved product-market fit in the mid-2010s, any subsequent innovation has been focused on developing new shiny objects that convince consumers and creators to give away their most valuable human resources for free: their attention and creativity, respectively. “[Features like Instagram] Stories, Reels, IGTV (Instagram’s mobile long-form video product) can feel so innovative,” I wrote in this Daily Reader, “that they distract from the reality that your creative work becomes less valuable the more you use these platforms.” We don’t necessarily need addictive products like Instagram and Facebook but they’re exceptional at persuading distracted consumers to casually splinter their time and attention (all to avoid “missing out” on a viral meme, celebrity beef or family photo) so they have a product to sell to advertisers.

There’s a serious cost though. I’ve cited research that shows 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” were up 71 percent. 

There’s also data that says the rate of 18 to 19 year-olds who had suicidal thoughts, plans or attempts increased 46 percent. Respondents 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.

We can agree that tech companies like Instagram didn’t create mental illness, perfectionism, comparison or mindless consumption. But their products amplify these effects, instead of minimizing because tech companies rarely function as the forces for good their founders believe the are. They’re businesses who profit from an ecosystem where users supply the data for tech companies to collect and the content for advertisers to promote their products against. More data enables companies to improve their targeting capabilities which they can trade for revenue from advertisers. Instagram, who is owned by Facebook, is no different. As Rodriguez writes in his CNBC report:

In recent years, as Instagram content became more polished and saturated with content from professional influencers, whom advertisers pay to promote particular products, the platform began to see more users delete or archive their original posts — especially posts that did not receive many likes, one of the former employees said.

Facebook’s growth and data science teams developed a hypothesis that getting rid of likes would make users feel less self-conscious when their posts don’t receive much engagement, spurring them to post more.

Facebook has always done research on likes, but the company began specifically experimenting with the idea of removing Instagram like counts in 2018, the people said. The experiment began as part of Instagram’s wellness project before Mosseri took charge of the social network in October 2018, one of the sources said, but Mosseri has prioritized it. “I’ve been spending a lot of time on this personally,” he said this October.

Under the changes, users will no longer be able to compare their posts’ like counts to their peers, but they’ll still receive a notification for each individual like. Those notifications could serve as an additional catalyst to get users to post more often.
In addition, people on Instagram tend to mimic the behaviors of their close friends and family, so getting a few users to start posting original content more frequently could create a viral effect, the former employees told CNBC.

This ad-supported business model constricts the opportunities available to most creators to build an independent lifestyle around their creative work.

Social media rewards likeability, not creativity

If you’re a creator who wants to win on these terms, then you must be okay with — and a master of — selling a likeable version of yourself (and often likeable versions of your loved ones) to businesses who want access to a community that you built and wouldn’t have access to otherwise.

Under these circumstances, creativity is no longer about making products, projects and experiences that add meaning to your fans by giving them something they want or need and value enough to pay attention to it, pay money for it, and tell others about it. It’s about brokering a relationship between your community and a brand — often under the guise of “authenticity.”

You can be as creative as all get-out, but if you strangers don’t think you’re likeable or #authentic enough, then good luck. As I wrote in “The Myth of Authenticity”:

When people say they want authenticity from the people they choose to follow, what I think they’re really looking for is likeability. How much we like someone is a significant factor in whether we pay attention to or pay for what someone has to offer. 

But the internet has weaponized authenticity as a bait-and-switch mechanism that invites people to expose their vulnerability only to shit on them for doing so when they trigger our own insecurities or fail to meet our unrealistic expectations. 

Journalist Alicia Menendez writes in her new book, The Likeability Trap: How to Break Free and Succeed as You Are:

For women, and for anyone with a minority identity, being to “be ourselves” at work feels a bit like a dangerous dare. Roll the dice and see if your authenticity resonates. If it does, you might reap great rewards. If it does not, your authenticity will be used against you as proof that you were never a fit.

When organizations tell workers to be themselves, they often ignore the reality of how hard it can be for young people, for minorities, for LGBTQ individuals and for women at large to develop credibility in the workplace. If you sit at the intersection of any combination of those identities, it can be even harder. We know that when we enter a room, there are assumptions made about us, and many of us go to great lengths to undercut those assumptions. We know that we must always be prepared. We cannot afford to slip up. “Be yourself” is only a safe declaration for those who are assumed to be competent, qualified and powerful.

Social media reinforces these same organizational rules of engagement at scale.

If you take a step back from the noise, you’ll realize there’s not really a way to earn the maximum value your creative work generates in the social media landscape because it’s only as valuable as the engagement it creates — not the worth of the knowledge, craft imagination and heart that went into producing it.

“It works for me”

Whenever I critique social media products, I get my fair share of blowback from creators and consumers. Successful creators argue that social media is valuable because for them because it grows their audiences, it sends traffic to their websites and it recommends them to their dream customers. Consumers tell me to relax because they just use social media as a fun escape from the monotony and misery of everyday life.

The gag is that big tech companies design their social product experiences to be anything but a “fun escape.” According to data from IDC Research, the average adult spends 87 minutes using social media on their phone Monday through Thursday. The usage nearly doubles to 160 minutes Friday through Sunday. Eight of 10 of the people reading this checked their phones within 15 minutes of waking up this morning. And 79 percent of all grownup smartphone users have their phones with them for 22 out of the 24 hours each day. This isn’t by accident. Social media has been engineered to be a ubiquitous bulwark of modern life. These products default to endless distraction. Excess, not moderation, is what fuels them.

On the creator side, unless you’re a mega influencer, there’s nominal value to be sustained from hoarding social approval — likes, retweets, followers, comments, clicks, et cetera — to sell advertisers. In fact, social approval will never be more valuable than owning your content and the direct relationship you have with your community, two assets social media will never give you autonomy over.

“Well, I hear you, but it works for me,” a friend, whose name I won’t publish because I didn’t get their consent before I published this newsletter, said to me during a recent conversation on this topic. That’s another one of capitalism’s tricks though: Emphasizing individual success even if the system that enables it prevents other people from having it too. Just because a handful of creators have “made it” in spite — not because — of these products doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be regulated (at best), broken up (at worst) or encouraged to redesign their business models so they’re less reliant on keeping people engaged, predicting our behaviors with algorithms and feeding off our data.

Until tech companies align their incentives with consumers and creators, gimmicks like hiding likes will continue to give the illusion of customer- and creator-centricity while their shareholders, investors and executives cash in on our creativity.