<p class="title">Instagram chief Adam Mosseri on Friday said that a test of hiding "likes" at the image and photo-sharing social network will spread to the US.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Heads up! We've been testing making likes private on Instagram in a number of countries this year," Mosseri said in a tweet.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"We're expanding those tests to include a small portion of people in the US next week." Facebook in September confirmed it is dabbling with no longer making a public display of how many "likes" are racked up by posts.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Such a change could ease the pressure to win approval with images, videos or comments and, instead, get people to simply focus on what is in the posts.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Facebook-owned Instagram earlier this year announced it was testing hiding like counts and video view tallies in more than a half-dozen countries, with account holders still able to see the numbers but masking amounts from others.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Twitter has also experimented with hiding numbers of times tweets were "liked" or "retweeted," according to product lead Kayvon Beykpour.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Twitter found that people engaged less with tweets when they couldn't see the counts.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"When you remove engagement indicators, people engage less," Beykpour said while briefing journalists at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco earlier this year. </p>
<p class="title">Instagram chief Adam Mosseri on Friday said that a test of hiding "likes" at the image and photo-sharing social network will spread to the US.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"Heads up! We've been testing making likes private on Instagram in a number of countries this year," Mosseri said in a tweet.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"We're expanding those tests to include a small portion of people in the US next week." Facebook in September confirmed it is dabbling with no longer making a public display of how many "likes" are racked up by posts.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Such a change could ease the pressure to win approval with images, videos or comments and, instead, get people to simply focus on what is in the posts.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Facebook-owned Instagram earlier this year announced it was testing hiding like counts and video view tallies in more than a half-dozen countries, with account holders still able to see the numbers but masking amounts from others.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Twitter has also experimented with hiding numbers of times tweets were "liked" or "retweeted," according to product lead Kayvon Beykpour.</p>.<p class="bodytext">Twitter found that people engaged less with tweets when they couldn't see the counts.</p>.<p class="bodytext">"When you remove engagement indicators, people engage less," Beykpour said while briefing journalists at Twitter headquarters in San Francisco earlier this year. </p>