Facebook and Instagram Will Allow Users to Remove the "Like" Button

Given the chance to remove "likes" from your posts, would you do so?

Alexander Shatov

For some, it's been a long time coming. For others, it's giving them anxiety just thinking about it. What on earth would Facebook and Instagram look like without a "like" button?

It’s an idea the company has been toying with for quite a while. Since at least 2018, Facebook has been kicking around the notion of removing a staple feature of the platform since 2009 — the “like” button. Of course, users have long had questions about the validity of the “like” button, as many people have surmised that having a constant feedback system for each and every behavior we engage in might actually be dangerous.

Facebook, the parent company of Instagram, has now announced both companies will give users the option to opt out of having the “like” button featured on their posts.

The change will allow users to hide the “like” count for their posts. The goal is also to try and foster a system that focuses on the content, rather than the pre-existing popularity of that content.

It’s difficult to emphasize enough how big of a change this is. Facebook headquarters even has a massive sign that features the well-known “like” graphic on it.

Citing safety concerns, especially among teens, the companies have decided to take a bold step in a new direction and, honestly, I couldn’t be happier about it. I think it’s a step in the right direction, but considering the vast problems of the internet more generally, and social media specifically, we need a lot more change than just this.

In its twelve years in existence on Facebook, the “like” button has become a bit of a staple of our society.

We pose and prim ourselves for likes. We crack jokes for likes. And many of us try so desperately to seek a sense of approval through this odd little button that exists only on social media.

Nowhere in the real world are our friends really sitting around sticking their thumbs up at the things we do or the clothes we wear. But the “like” feature is ubiquitous throughout the cyberspace realm. So much so that it guides our behavior.

And it does so for some rather disappointing reasons.

And of all of those reasons, the most salient is the fact that the entire internet is built on a symbiosis, an ever-present and omnipresent feedback system that allows the systems we use to determine what we “like” and what we don’t like.

This is how content is curated, as most of us know by now, and it’s how the machines have learned to show us what we see in our feeds that we carry around with us basically 24–7. When you “like” something, you tell the system that it should show that same thing to more people.

Like the stock market is a massive collective feedback system of most of the world’s on-the-books economic activity, social media is that with our social activity.

Brands and celebrities live and die by the social media sword; those who were famous yesterday are forgotten tomorrow, and those who’ve yet to be discovered are pushing their hardest to carve a path through the massive behemoth of social media in order to stake their claim to greatness.

Anyone who’s ever not garnered enough “likes” to be relegated to the forgotten realm of internet lands, that shadow place where your posts are never shown to your friends and it begins to feel like you’re screaming at a wall, knows exactly what I’m talking about. If you make a couple of missteps, it’s easy to be forgotten, lost in the vast sea of the content in which we’re all begrudgingly swimming.

Rates of suicide and self-harm are on the rise among teenagers, but especially teenage girls. And while we’ve still got much to learn, it’s beginning to look like time spent on social media is correlated with the uptick.

“Likes” have become a popularity contest, a social currency of sorts, one that we become anxious and depressed when we’re deprived of it. Rather than having any utilitarian value, the currency of likes is what helps us get through the day and feel whole.

Ultimately, time will tell if Facebook's decision to allow users, both on Facebook proper and Instagram, to disable their like button, will make a difference. Something tells me many users will just ignore the option altogether. Or, we could be on the edge of something completely new and different, a new paradigm shift that changes the way we use the internet and how we socialize on it.

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