“We will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s well-being and health” says Instagram’s CEO Adam Mosseri. To that end, next week Instagram will expand its test of hiding Like counts from everyone but a post’s creator to the United States.
Mosseri revealed the plan at the Wired25 conference today, saying Instagram will be monitoring to see how it affects users as well as influencers. Mosseri said the hope was to “depressurize” Instagram, make it “less of a competition”, and give people space to connect with who they care about in order to “reduce anxiety” and “reduce social comparison”.
Instagram began testing this in April in Canada and expanded it to Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand in July. Facebook started a similar experiment in Australia in September.