Death to the "Like" Button

I hold my breath after a social media post and await a reaction and I’m lured by the intoxicating idea that people like me. Instagram swirls around me and teases me—don’t you want more?

Waiting, I open an acquaintance’s picture. I see her flowing hair, her adoring husband, her doting friends. She seems magnetic and perfectly confident she is in her place. A slow insecurity creeps up: shouldn’t I be that way?

Social media damages us. But not for the reasons you might think.

It’s true that we don’t look into each other’s eyes because we’re looking at our phones, but would we gaze lovingly at each other without our phones? Probably not. And yes, the average American spends 2.5 hours a day on social media. But the time spent is not what gets me.

What offends me about Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter is that they all have a “like” button—until now. Instagram just announced it will remove “likes”. We should applaud them for prioritizing our health and we should demand other social networks do the same.

As it stands, Instagram delivers excitement and loneliness, a club and an alley. Here’s why I’m excited about the proposed changes: we feel enthralled when the number of “likes” exponentially rolls in, so we post only the happiest time, the funniest time, the most picture-perfect family to get the most number of likes. They’re so #blessed. It makes us feel like we need to be extreme to be noticed or to matter. And when we only see the best of others’ lives, it’s only natural that we question the worst of ours.

The creators of this technology know this. Sean Parker, the ex-president of Facebook, said, “The thought process that went into building these applications, Facebook being the first of them, was all about: 'How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?’ He went on to explain that they get your attention through “likes”.

This feeling may seem like a sad, but inconsequential thing. But when we see that people we know seem so integrated into their lives, we expect our lives to match. Loneliness is when your relationships meet your expectations and needs. And so, we can feel downright lonely when we don’t have the relationships we see on there.

In reality, consistent loneliness (like, for example, if you were to compare your relationships to other people’s pictures daily) can lead to serious health consequences, like a weakened immune system, blood pressure issues, and sustained inflammation that leads to diseases like Alzheimer’s and cancer.

The answer is not to cancel all of our accounts. There’s a reason we’re all hooked. It’s exciting to hear new ideas, new news, new updates, and from new people. We don’t need to give that up.

Instagram removing “likes” represents a massive shift toward a genuine concern about our health. It lays down the crown we’ve placed on the ability to hold your attention for longer and the advertising that follows that. It rejects the idea that social media needs to exploit the basic human desire to feel liked. Instagram is slowly moving toward a humane approach to the internet.

We need to continue to hold these companies accountable—to demand they respect our well-being. Sounds crazy? We’ve done it before. McDonald’s used to not show the calories on a Big Mac and changing this cost them money. But we demanded it to improve our health.

So, what would a “like”-less social media look like? No “likes” mean these companies would have to do a much better job curating content, to show you what you like, like Netflix does. It means more work for them, but a better outcome for our-wellbeing. They could even keep the “like” feature on business posts, to help them show you what you might like to see.

The next step might be putting a big clock at the top of every one of these sites so we’re aware of how much time we’re spending there, how much we’ve allowed other people’s images to control what we think of as normal.

We drive the social media companies’ behaviors. If we demand they think about our social wellbeing, as they claim they do, they will have to change their product to serve us. One of them has already started. And maybe then I won’t hold my breath after posting anymore.