In an effort to reduce the pressure of using social media, Facebook Inc. could get rid of its ‘Like’ count on the news feed.

The possibility was first raised today by app researcher Jane Manchun Wong, who noticed that in the Android app Facebook was hiding the number of ‘Likes’ on some posts from everyone but the poster. “I observed that Facebook has recently begun prototyping this hidden like/reaction count feature in their Android app by reverse-engineering the app and playing with the code underneath,” she said in a blog post.

She went on to say that while the poster will be able to see who liked a post, the number of people will be hidden. This follows a similar move by Instagram, which has experimented with removing likes in an effort to cut down on envy and bullying.

In response, Facebook said that indeed it is experimenting with this and Likes may go away in the future. The company didn’t explicitly say why it was doing this, but one would presume for the same reason Instagram did it.

For years now, people have talked about the phenomenon of “Facebook envy” and some research has shown that the constant battle to be Liked might cause depression – especially in the young. Social media in general has been called too addictive, resulting in a slew of tracking features coming out to tell users that their daily usage limit is up, or should be.

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