Instagram Reels Now Broadcasts Your Likes to Your Friends
TikTokers may have returned to their platform of choice , but with the US ban still in place, they are facing an existential threat. Meanwhile, Instagram Reels users are faced with a problem created by the platform itself: Meta, in all its wisdom, is making it easier than ever for users to see who liked a particular video. This, of course, means two things: It’s easier than ever to see which videos your friends have liked, but it’s also easier than ever for your friends to see which videos you’ve liked.
Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram, announced the changes in a post on Friday . Here’s what’s new: When you launch Reels on Instagram, you can now see a bar in the top right corner of the screen where you’ll find profile photos of friends who liked a particular reel. Tap this bar and you’ll be taken to another video channel called With Friends. This channel exclusively presents videos that your friends liked. In my experience, most videos in a feed are only liked by one friend, but from time to time I see videos that are liked by several friends.
Whether a video has one like or three, you can click on any user’s profile picture to confirm they liked the video and reply to them if you want. There’s also a bar at the bottom of the page that allows you to reply to that user’s likes or simply react with a laughing, crying, or “in love” emoji.
When you reply to the like, a Direct message will be sent to your friend. Here they’ll see a thumbnail of the video in question with your message or reaction emoji underneath it. Above it they will see “Reply to your like” so they will know it was a direct response to their like and not that you shared a video you liked with them.
Instagram has been showing likes for a long time now
Some of these experiences are not new. Anyone who’s spent time browsing Reels knows that Instagram often shows you when one or more of your friends have liked a video you’re watching. However, this change makes those likes visible in a way they weren’t before: Finding your friends’ likes used to be a much more random and passive process. You can now deliberately scroll through videos your friends have liked, greatly increasing the number of videos you like.
I suppose there’s an argument to be made that this change makes it easier to find content you might like since you likely share some interests with your friends on Instagram. However, I also take the other side: making likes more visible will encourage people to stop liking videos. Instagram Reels is a black hole of content, and your finely tuned algorithm will probably show you at least a few videos that you find interesting or funny, but you know other people won’t. Or maybe you’d rather not have others know that you find them interesting or funny. There’s a lot of brain-bending humor out there (among other things), and I’m willing to bet that many won’t want to flamboyantly endorse every bizarre video that gets a reaction out of them.
Can you prevent your friends from seeing videos you like on Instagram?
If this change has you worried, bad news: this time there doesn’t seem to be a way to disable the feature. Instagram lets you hide likes on posts and videos, but the app doesn’t offer the ability to prevent others from seeing which videos you’ve liked. For now, if you like a video, you have to assume that your friends might find out about it at some point while browsing the app.