Roommates, social media had a virtual meltdown when out of the blue Instagram’s signature “likes” were suddenly gone—but thankfully the company quickly offered an explanation. Following online conversation causing the social media giant to trend, Instagram explained that an apparent glitch was the cause of all the drama.
Every social media platform has a signature feature and for Instagram that happens to be “likes,” so when it looked like the feature was gone forever, naturally fans started to immediately go into panic mode. According to Instagram, a bug is responsible for “likes” vanishing from user feeds, which they plan to correct immediately.
A Facebook spokesperson (the other social media company that owns Instagram) posted a message about what happened:
“We’ve been testing a new experience to hide likes on Feed posts. We unintentionally added more people to the test today, which was a bug — we’re fixing this issue and restoring like counts to those people as soon as possible.”
However, this is not the first time that Instagram has publicly announced that it would be running tests regarding removing the “like” feature entirely or switching up the way that it is currently used.
Back in November 2019, the company tweeted the following message about testing the removal of “likes”:
“We’re expanding our test of private like counts globally. If you’re in the test, you’ll no longer see the total number of likes and views on photos and videos posted to Feed unless they’re your own.
While the feedback from early testing in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan and New Zealand has been positive, this is a fundamental change to Instagram, and so we’re continuing our test to learn more from our global community.
In addition, we understand that like counts are important for many creators, and we are actively thinking through ways for creators to communicate value to their partners.”
As of now, it’s unclear what Instagram’s next step will be surrounding the permanent or limited removal of “likes.”
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