Instagram expands its test to hide the number of likes on other users' posts to six more countries: Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand
Context & Ripple Effects
This expansion follows Instagram's earlier rollout of hidden Like counts in Canada and marks the second wave of the experiment, adding Ireland, Italy, Japan, Brazil, Australia, and New Zealand. The company framed it as a wellbeing test — removing the public scoreboard on other people's posts while leaving authors able to see their own totals.
The test did not stay a test for long: within four months Instagram brought it to the United States (the US trial followed the same country sequence), then extended it to the rest of the world, and by 2021 had converted hiding into a user-controlled option globally — with Facebook running a parallel test.
First-order effects
- Users across the six newly added markets stop seeing Like counts on other accounts' posts, changing how they evaluate content at a glance.
- Influencers and brands in those markets lose the most visible public proof of reach on their posts, forcing reliance on their own analytics dashboards instead.
Second-order effects
- Marketers and creator managers shift measurement toward private metrics and screenshots of backend data, weakening the public flex that drove influencer pricing conversations.
- Facebook's decision in 2021 to run its own similar test shows the experiment propagating through the family of apps rather than stopping at Instagram.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, public engagement counts become an opt-in display choice rather than a default, structurally separating what platforms measure internally from what audiences are shown.
- Wellbeing-driven metric changes set a template regulators and platforms elsewhere can point to when arguing visibility itself is a design lever, not just an algorithm question.
The trend: Social platforms are moving from fixed public engagement metrics toward user-controlled visibility, with Instagram's staged country-by-country tests setting the cadence.