What Is a Like?

A Like is a kind of social media engagement. It’s a fast way to prove you — literally — like the content that you share by simply clicking a button. The Like icon is a thumbs-up on Facebook, while a heart shows a Like on Instagram and Twitter. Liking content also functions like bookmarking, because you can go back later to show your Liked content.

A Like is an action that a Facebook user or an Instagram user can make. A user can click the Like button instead of writing a comment or sharing a message, as a fast way to display approval.

However, since it has been considered a harmful feature for people’s mental well-being, Instagram has started its experiment with reducing the number of likes from a tweet.

The feature was trialed in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand and it completely removes the ‘like’ counts from individual posts that are publicly viewable.

Instead of using numbers to view a ‘like’ list, photos would only indicate that a few “and others” users had liked a specific post.

A study for the Royal Society for Public Health (RSPH) has found the ‘Like’ icon is considered the most dangerous feature of social media.

A poll of more than 2,000 people for the public entity showed teenagers and adults considered the button to be the most ‘toxic’ feature built into devices, only above push alerts that continuously drag users back to the pages.

The findings led the RSPH to call upon social media companies to reconsider their sites’ “architecture.”

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