Meta has announced it’s officially testing an Instagram dislike button across Reels and grid posts. In a post on Threads, Instagram head Adam Mosseri said that nobody would be able to see who disliked their comment. This includes the comment’s author.
According to Mosseri, the company is testing the dislike button to make the comments section a more “friendly” place. “Eventually, we may integrate this signal into comments ranking to move disliked comments lower down,” he said. “Our hope is that this might help make comments more friendly on Instagram.”
Netizens React to Instagram Dislike Button
However, not all users seemed to be on board with this plan. “We have seen before things like dislikes or downvotes be used as a political tool to suppress “non-conservative” leaning posts by reporting en masse,” one Threads user wrote. “Are there/will there be measures to prevent this misuse?”
“This will turn it into Reddit and trolls will spam people they don’t like and upvote the worst comments,” another predicted. Echoing these sentiments, a third added: “It’s also open to abuse by troll farms or syndicated groups, especially when there’s no human oversight.”
Mosseri hasn’t addressed any of these concerns at the time of writing. Moreover, he hasn’t given any more details about the tool outside of the fact that a small focus group is testing it.
Downvotes are a defining quality of platforms like Reddit, but unlike Threads, its downvotes are public. Without this visibility, I don’t see Instagram’s ‘dislike’ feature taking off in quite the same way.
