In the days after my dad died, there were many things I dreaded. One of them was sharing the news on social media. My love for my father had been well-recorded on my Instagram, so the pressure to get the announcement felt simultaneously intense and stupidly superficial.
In the end, I chose to turn off the likes and comments on the post because I didn’t want to see engagement on something that was completely heartfelt. Yesterday, I opened Instagram and noticed an update: Beneath each photo, next to the number of likes and comments, I could now see the number of times a post on my feed had been shared. From what I could tell, this was true for every account across the board—from those with the coveted blue check mark to friends with fewer than 500 followers.
Verified accounts have always had access to this information through a private, back-end dashboard, but it’s never been available to the public until now. And as somebody who has recently found social media really sad, I suddenly felt self-conscious, too. In 2019, Instagram rolled out the ability to hide the number of likes on your posts, with platform head, Adam Mosseri, , “We want people to worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re getting and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about.
” The option came after a slew of third-party scientific studies released startling findings about the effects of social media on our psyche (an ongoing area of study). Its use is tied and c.