Mind Over Metrics? Why Instagram Isn’t Removing Likes For Your Mental Health
Big tech sees no reason to care. The rest of us keep proving their point.
Whether you were one of the lucky — or unlucky — few to have been affected, or just someone who logged on to a whole host of posts, stories, and tweets about it, you’ll no doubt be aware that Instagram hid like counts from people’s posts for a few hours, and the internet didn’t know what to think.
Apparently, turning them off completely was a mistake on Instagram’s part. They’ve been testing out hiding likes on a select few feed posts for a while now, but “unintentionally added more people to the test today, which was a bug.” Like counts were soon restored, but not before a plethora of conversations had kicked off around the implications of removing likes, and the pros and cons of doing so. Many of those conversations put Instagram’s motivation for trialling the new feature down to concerns around the impact of social media on mental health, even going so far as to praise the move for “bringing awareness.”
Needless to say, we’ve been aware for some time. Studies and reviews from at least as far back as 2014 have shown a direct correlation between social media and declining mental health, particularly among young people, with last year’s The Social Dilemma on Netflix one of the more recent examples of those concerns resurfacing in the mainstream. Instagram in particular has ranked as the worst platform for mental health, linked to depression and anxiety.
At Wired25 conference in November 2020, Instagram CEO Adam Mosseri told the audience “we will make decisions that hurt the business if they help people’s wellbeing and health.” But time and again, this hasn’t been the case. What about dragging their feet to sufficiently moderate live broadcasts of child abuse, murder, and rape over on Facebook Live (Instagram’s parent company), and refusing to provide equal protections from harmful content encouraging self-harm and suicide within the EU on Instagram itself? Are we really to believe this latest move is big tech finally finding a conscience?
The real reason Instagram are trialling removing likes, of course, is money. Specifically, they’re looking to get a cut out of the influencer industry that relies so heavily on its platform for profit.
Removing likes makes it harder for influencers on Instagram to market their page to brands, thus encouraging brands to place ads directly on Instagram instead. It also lays the foundations for a potential Facebook-owned service to connect brands with the best influencers to sell their products, once they’re the only ones with access to data on reliable engagement metrics (the argument being that even if individual users can still see the numbers themselves, these could easily be manipulated). All this for a fee of course. And all under the guise of looking out for user mental health.
One of the first outraged posts I saw this morning from a millennial marketing expert showed a redacted screenshot of a panicked text conversation between himself and a friend waking up to the news that Instagram likes had (seemingly) been erased forever. “Is Instagram coming to an end??” the post lamented, boiling the decision down to “mental health awareness” and centring the danger that brands and agencies relying on influencers would now be in as a result. Commenters included brand and marketing “thought leaders” with mixed positive and negative reactions to the change, that echoed much of what was seen elsewhere on the internet — brands railing against the impact on business, influencers concerned about the threat to their livelihoods, and of course, those who viewed the move more favourably in light of the implied benefits to mental health.
In short, then, the reactions played right into Facebook’s hands. They want brands to be outraged, and for influencers to panic, in order to create a demand for the (paid) solution they’ll doubtless provide. It was also incredibly telling — if not at all unexpected — to see businesses prioritise their concerns about profit margins over concerns around mental health. If Facebook were ever worried that increased scrutiny on the link between social media and wellbeing might be bad for business, today’s reaction made it clear that it’s not. Perhaps whatever paid-for service Facebook have in mind will be presented as a reasonable compromise — big tech looking out for the mental health of consumers and safeguarding the livelihoods of brands and influencers alike. Not unlike the UK government leaking proposed legislation to the press in an effort to gauge public reaction, it would be wholly unsurprising to find out today’s “accident” was intentional after all.
By failing to hold companies to account for using the thin veil of mental health “awareness” for profit, we become part of the problem.
Setting the bar this low for big tech to address their part in the link between social media and mental health does us all a disservice. If this truly is a conversation about mental health, then the time for “awareness” has passed. We need to be pushing for meaningful action from big tech to help tackle declining mental health as a result of social media (a topic for another time, but swift and effective moderation of aforementioned content depicting self harm, suicide, sexual abuse, and violence being a good place to start, rather than directing this energy towards the policing of women’s bodies, particularly sex workers and women of colour). We cannot allow ourselves to settle for disingenuous half measures with minimal effect. Even if removing likes was solely a move to help protect the mental wellbeing of users, it feels woefully shallow at best. At worst — and you can bet the worst will happen — it’s just another smokescreen for capitalising on the demand to monetise every aspect of our lives, and hijacking a mental health crisis for profit.
Nothing new about that feature at all.
