In May this year, Facebook rolled out a new feature that would allow its users to hide their public like counts. In a nutshell, this meant that if a person so chooses, others cannot see how many ‘likes’ or reactions their posts have received. In a blog post explaining the decision, the company said that the decision was taken after testing to see if hiding these counters would ‘depressurise’ people’s experience on Instagram.
“What we heard from people and experts was that not seeing like counts was beneficial for some and annoying to others,” it said. Therefore, users were given the choice to decide whether they want to hide their public like counts or keep them.
Internal documents accessed by The Wire, which were submitted to the US Congress by whistleblower Frances Haugen, show that this move may well have been the result of research that Facebook conducted on ‘social comparison’ – a theory which suggests that people evaluate their own abilities (or popularity, in the case of social media) by comparing themselves to others.
The research document, titled ‘Country Differences in Social Comparison’ and dated June 18, 2019, was intended to explain global differences in social comparison so that Facebook’s product development can be
— source thewire.in | Amrit B.L.S. | 13/Nov/2021
[try to keep away from social control media. that is good for you and societ.]