Imagine a stranger asked you for your 14-year-old daughter's phone number and email address. Would you give them?
Branislav Mikšík
Social Media Manager / Copywriter
7. August 2019
5 min
BeginnerImagine a stranger asked you for your 14-year-old daughter's phone number and email address. Would you give them?
I admit the opening comparison may be a touch tabloid and far-fetched, but the point is clear. Roughly 2 million children aged 13 to 15 use a business profile on Instagram rather than a private one. And with it they publish their phone number or email address. The rise in switching to business accounts came about mainly after the "hiding" of the number of hearts on individual Instagram posts in private profiles — a change Instagram is currently testing and one which, paradoxically, is meant to protect children. The data specialist David Stier published the finding in his recent study of a sample of 200,000 young people.
Word of the temporary removal of like counts — hearts — under posts reached our corner of the internet too. The test is currently running in selected countries. The familiar Instagram "hearts" and their exact count under posts have been replaced by the more general "Liked by XY" and the number will be shown only to the individual — the account owner.
The reason? "We do not want Instagram to be a place of competition…," said Instagram's head Adam Mosseri. One cause of the test is surely also the findings of a study by the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH), in which Instagram came out as the social network with the worst impact on mental health (for information, YouTube fared best).
An interesting perspective on the subject comes from behavioural psychology. If you remember the famous Pavlov experiment with dogs, our behaviour works to a large degree on conditioning. On the scheme of stimulus – response – reward. Hearts — likes work as a reward that conditions our future behaviour. On top of that they also work as a broader, social recognition, which multiplies their effect. Add their unpredictability and uncertainty, and the fact that we perceive the theoretically limitless scope for raising their number as a reward too, and we get a simple but incredibly powerful weapon for shaping our behaviour. Add half a billion users — potential rivals — and the psychological vulnerability of young people between 13 and 24.
Put another way, it is precisely the hearts that keep users on Instagram to a large degree and "force" them to stay. The example of a gambler helps: they cannot let the next game pass, because that is the one that may bring the hoped-for win. Improbability, uncertainty and a degree of powerlessness over the outcome are the cornerstone of a developing addiction. Constantly checking the feed, the stories, one's own hearts and other people's slips into neurotic behaviour (known too as FOMO), which a young person often does not notice, not least because it is socially tolerated. The size of the win is therefore not the essential thing; three or four hearts for an ordinary user can produce a similar effect to 2,000–3,000 for a better-known one. What matters is the game itself. Which is also why a gambler never stops playing. The line between controlled consumption and addiction is already fairly clearly defined.
So what would happen if the strongest reward disappeared and "only" attractive content remained — the app's original intention, in fact? Would that be enough? Would the results of psychological research be more positive? Partly yes, but it would not rid us of comparison as one source of psychological problems. The only solution would then be to scrap the whole app or divide it into levels according to users' social standing. Something similar was attempted (unsuccessfully) years ago by the app Facebook for the rich. Does that strike you as utopian? An intrusion on freedom and human rights? Or will we reach the stage where it is naturally IN not to be on the network at all? Or at least not to be there in today's sense — as the majority's passive consumer of other people's content.
Clearly, removing like counts would affect influencers too, for whom the number is one measure of success. What do they make of the trend? For one well-known fitness figure (the name is with the editors), impressions matter more than likes when judging a campaign's success:
"I look at impressions most anyway — that is, how many times people viewed the post. Plenty of people do not wish you success, so they will not give you a like, but when a photo simply catches your eye you cannot help looking at it; you think that by not liking it you will not give yourself away, yet merely by viewing it you are helping the person…"
Asked what she would do if Instagram stopped showing like counts here too (even though the user themselves would still see them), she answered:
"The same as until now, and perhaps, since I would not see the difference between the likes on a photo where I show off my assets and one where only my face is visible, I would post more of the photos I want rather than the ones people want to see."
On the strength of these findings and the wider public debate, Instagram is evidently trying to take better care of its users. Besides removing hearts, another change is meant to be the introduction of "warnings" shown before publishing a post that breaches the community rules, together with a warning that the account may be deleted. That covers nudity, pornography, bullying, sexual harassment, hate speech, drug sales and terrorism. But also, for instance, searching for topics and keywords such as depression, melancholy, suicide… These measures should help improve the social media environment and users' mental wellbeing. Whether they really will, the future and psychological research will show. There is not a great deal of it on the subject today. Put simply, we are still too absorbed in the presence of the new to take an adequate distance, in time or in thought.
Sources:
Branislav Mikšík
Social Media Manager / Copywriter
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