Facebook Hiding “Likes” on Social Media
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/26/technology/facebook-hidden-likes.html
In “Facebook Tests Hiding ‘Likes’ on Social Media Posts Image,” Facebook is changing their functionality of like, comment, view, and etc. In today’s society, for the people who use social media, users regard “Likes as a status symbol. More Likes on a social media post meant it was popular, engaging, and worthwhile.” To be “popular,” users have been posting more radical, violent, and extreme content. In order to prevent from chaos, Facebook is testing to hide the popularity features from the users. This new change already has been tested in Australia. They are still in progress, so they have not announced whether the experiment will go beyond Australia.
Aside from the fact that this is related to social network, this article is related to our class because of what the guest lecturer Lars Backstrom talked about. Mr. Backstrom talked about how Facebook uses informations from Facebook’s functions such as click, like, comment, share, and etc. to figure out what informations and posts to put in a user’s news feeds. Using the datas from this, Facebook scored one user to another to figure out if that user’s information is another user. All the Facebook functions were all visible to the all the users. One could easily how many views that the video someone posted got and how many likes one’s post got. However, as Facebook (and also Instagram) is moving toward hiding these features will be create a new environment in social network. Facebook will still use the datas from the features to figure out the algorithm for news feeds, but by changing the functionality, it is moving to limit the importance of these social metrics of likes, comments, and more.