In an effort to improve Facebook users' mental health, the company is tinkering with hiding the "likes".
Zoetica Media Founder and CEO Kami Huyse said we place so much emphasis on what people say on social media.
"In the real world, when somebody doesn't pay attention to you, you aren't being watched by other people, and other people aren't seeing that other people aren't pay attention to you," said Huyse.
She said dopamine is the drug of choice to get that constant reassurance that makes people feel good.
"When you have the social environment that, you know, the next big thing, they want to win, you know. They want to have more likes than your likes," said Huyse.
She said advertisers do a lot of measurements of likes, so they won't appreciate not being able to see that.
Another local social media professional said from a business standpoint, if Facebook does that, it will no longer show that vanity metric to the public. The data on the likes will still be available in the admin area for the page owners to see.
This has been tested in other countries--not the United States.