Instagram’s New Feature

Raquel Perry, Reporter

Instagram may be considering a new feature that would prevent everyone from seeing the number of likes you get on your posts. Instead, it will focus on who liked the image.

The new feature was announced on Tuesday, during Facebook’s annual conference. Instagram — which is owned by Facebook — says that only the owner of the content can see how many people “liked” their photo or video, and no “likes” will be seen in social feeds.  Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri recently outlined the experiment  because he feels that users constantly compare their lives or physical attractiveness to others on the image-based platform.

“We want people to worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re getting on Instagram and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about,” Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, said Tuesday during Facebook’s annual F8 conference. With numerous studies coming across, the psychological drawbacks of social media use have gained more attention, with parents, consumer advocates and tech companies, pointing to its potential to increase anxiety and social isolation.

Many others feel like the feature would not fully solve the problem however. Randi Priluck, a professor and associate dean at Pace University who focuses on social media and mobile marketing, told CNN. ” For teenagers, this is great because it would no longer highlight levels of popularity of themselves against other kids, but they’re still going to see their own likes. People are very driven by rewards so they’re still going to be competing for those likes. It’s not going to fully solve the problem.”

The “test run” will start in Canada this week. Instagram hopes users will enjoy this new feature and it would change the frequency and manner with which they engage content.