- Earlier this week Business Insider found that Instagram posts across several countries had all of their "likes" hidden, with Instagram confirming that this was part of a global test that hides the total like counts on a post.
- However, the social media company has now backtracked and said that an internal investigation revealed it was not part of a trial, but actually just a technical glitch that would be fixed in the next update.
- In July, the Facebook-owned platform announced it would be changing how users can see like count publicly.
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Two days after Instagram claimed to have completely deleted post "likes" as part of a trial run, the company has admitted to Business Insider that the move was actually just a technical bug and the removal of likes was accidental.
On Tuesday, Business Insider confirmed a large amount of users had "likes" removed from their feed completely. Instagram incorrectly confirmed at the time that this removal was a part of a global test being run across several countries.
The social media company has now backtracked and said after an internal investigation they found it was actually just a technical glitch – but would not confirm how many users were affected. They did, however, confirm that users in six countries were affected by it.
In May, Instagram announced it was rolling out a trial that would hide like counts in Canada, which was followed by another rollout in Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Ireland, Italy and Japan two months later. The test changed how users could see the total number of "likes" on a post publicly, for example seeing only "[name] and others" under posts instead. However, it was not meant to remove likes completely, something which ended up happening to some users.
Read more:How to put music on your Instagram story and customize it.
Business Insider can confirm the bug affected users in all test countries except Canada and affected users had "likes" removed on a majority of their organic posts. The bug removed "likes" completely from any posts that were not also liked by someone you follow.
Instagram confirmed they will roll out an update fixing the problem in the coming days.
"Our test is about removing the pressure of like counts by making them private, not removing likes altogether. We found a bug where some people weren't seeing social context (e.g. 'Liked by XX and others') on some posts. We've corrected this and the fix will roll out in the coming days," an Instagram spokesperson told Business Insider in a statement.
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