It was about to be called awesome, a term very typical of surfers that translates as great or fabulous. But, in the end, Facebook decided that a simple 'Like' would be cleaner and more universal. 15 years ago, in February 2009, Mark Zuckerberg's company introduced a new functionality, that little button that one of the company's original designers, Soleio Cuervo, drew with the help of Photoshop as a hand raising its thumb. All users of the social network, which then numbered about 150 million people around the world – at the end of the year, there would already be 350 and now Meta is supposed to be close to 3.6 billion active users – received a note on their feeds titled 'Like' encouraging them to use it.
Did the company know what it had on its hands? An internal study at Facebook recommended implementing it because when testing it, data analysts realized that posts with more likes received more interactions and appeared in more users' feeds. At the time, Facebook was growing wildly but was having trouble making money. Even so, according to most observers who moved through Silicon Valley in those years, the company was not aware of what they had on their hands. Likes would soon be more than an expression of taste and identity, they would be the best ally of the algorithm to position brands and advertisers and they would become the most reliable gauge of popularity of anything, whether it was a portrait of a person, a shampoo or the candidate of a political party. And it didn't take long for users to modify their behavior based on that button and prioritize the content that gave them the most likes.
According to Marta Peirano, author of books such as Against the Future (Debate) and journalist specialized in the intersection between technology and power, with 'Like', Facebook had found “the magic key of operant conditioning.” For her, the like represents “the reward of that circuit that we make when we update the screen over and over again, that heart-shaped quantification.”
In the business sense, it was the second most important step since the Google search engine to reconvert the utopian internet of the beginning, that of shared knowledge and the horizontality of knowledge, to the commercial internet in which a few companies trade with the attention of their users, selling it to advertisers who can pay for it.
After the 'like' (which already existed on websites like Vimeo) would come the heart of Instagram and Tik Tok, the retweet now converted into a repost on X, and all the other quantifiers of popularity on the internet. Facebook's own 'Like', which mutated into Meta in October 2021, has been undergoing changes. In 2016, the reactions that could be had to a post were expanded. In addition to likes, love, haha, wow, sad, and angry were offered.
In 2019, Facebook tested the possibility of hiding likes in Australia, when it already knew, as proven by the leaked papers that led Mark Zuckerberg to sit before a US Senate investigative committee, that his invention was instrumental in undermining health. mentality of its younger users (not to mention its content moderators).
A decade and a half later, some of the engineers who participated in its creation, like Leah Pearlman, do not feel, like Robert Oppenheimer with his own diabolical invention, that they contributed to being “destroyers of worlds,” but they have expressed in several interviews that its creation served to reflect the deepest part of human weaknesses, the need to like, compare and compete, and that the financial and political impact of this quantification is immeasurable.
How are we in year 15 after the 'like'? Sadder, more anxious, more distracted, more polarized and less informed. But, several times a day, we receive electronic validations that warm our hearts for a nanosecond.
“Social media is a way of drugging the social experience,” said psychiatrist and head of the Stanford University addictions department Anna Lembke in the documentary The Social Dilemma, about the repercussions of platform use. And 'like' and its equivalents would be the main instrument of that drug administration. Receiving validation like that activates a release of dopamine, the happiness hormone, according to several studies, greater than what an interaction in real life would cause.
The more that need is activated, the more the brain needs it, but repetition makes it less exciting, so you end up needing more validation to obtain the same pleasure. In the same way, a dopamine deficit is also generated, returning the brain to levels of unhappiness greater than those experienced before being a user of social networks.
In the same documentary, Tristan Harris, self-proclaimed “technology ethicist” and co-founder of the Human Technology Institute (a platform of Silicon Valley repentants who participated in the beginnings of modern social networks and now preach their dangers), assures that These mechanisms are not “dangerous by accident, but dangerous by design”, the same theory defended by thinkers such as Geert Lovink, author of the book Sad by Design. Social networks as ideology (Consonni).
Being liked by the group has always been a primary need and humans have always found ways to intuit the extent to which they are or are not socially successful, but never, until fifteen years ago, had they had such easy-to-use tools to quantify the extent to which they are liked or not. . “This is like refined sugar. Without intermediaries, you can know if you are successful or not without a doubt. And evolutionarily we are not used to having this information. It is a mechanism that takes on emotional and psychological dimensions for which we are not prepared,” concludes Clara Pretus, neuroscientist, director of the Social Lab Brain and researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and the Hospital del Mar.
Pretus describes the introduction of likes as “revolutionary” precisely because it provides a quantifiable metric of social success, and that gives rise to “a much fiercer social comparison than if we carried it out through more unconscious and automatic processes.”
“One of the worst things that can happen to a human being is social rejection, and the fact that everyone can see our popularity alters our behavior. There are studies that show that the number of 'likes' modulates it. It makes us adapt to our audience, always anticipating and adapting to that expectation of social reinforcement,” adds Pretus. The most popular contents tend to be those with high emotionality.
When this social reinforcement does not occur and abstinence occurs, the effects are greater in adolescents, he points out, for two reasons: because their brains are not yet fully developed and because the group acceptance factor is much more important in adolescence. . “This has negative effects on an emotional and self-esteem level, when we cannot receive this reinforcement that we anticipate.
The famous leaked Facebook papers, published by the Wall Street Journal in 2021, were out there. They were internal studies of the company, focused mainly on Instagram, which is also owned by Zuckerberg, and showed numbers such as 32% of teenage users who said they felt worse about their bodies after using Instagram or 13% of users (women, men and non-binary) whose suicidal thoughts could be traced to their social media use.
“We are experiencing a serious attention crisis. The average worker now spends just three minutes on a task; for every child diagnosed with an attention deficit problem when I was seven, there are now about a hundred. But it is important to understand that our attention did not collapse, it was stolen from us,” warns Johann Hari, popularizer and author of The Value of Attention (Peninsula) in an email. In the book, which is based on his own experience, he identifies a dozen factors (from food to educational programs to office design) that contribute to this generalized dispersion and the 'like' mechanism is one from them.
“For the book, I went to interview Earl Miller, one of the most prominent neuroscientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and he explained to me a crucial factor about being human. That the brain can only produce one or two thoughts in the conscious mind. He pointed out to me that we have limited cognitive ability, but we think we can multitask, for example writing an article while being interrupted by notifications. We think we have a seamless experience of consciousness but in reality what the brain does is shut down and reconfigure moment by moment, task by task, and that has a cost. What you do is less creative, less competent, you make more mistakes, you remember less. Being chronically interrupted is as harmful as being high.”
Hari also quotes Tristan Harris, who told him: “You can try to have self-control [in the use of networks] but you have thousands of engineers on the other side of the screen working against you.” Even so, he does apply small corrective measures in his house, such as locking his cell phone in a box for certain periods of time or to watch a movie with his partner.
One of the recent studies that Clara Pretus has carried out with her study group at the UAB consisted of recruiting participants identified with extreme right-wing ideas and showing them different posts from the X network while measuring their brain responses with magnetic resonance imaging. . The participants were shown two types of publications, some that had to do with very polarizing topics (immigration, gender violence, nationalism) and others with a less charged moral aspect (for example, the state of the roads). “What we saw, at the brain level, is that there was a very high activation in areas that have to do with social cognition and perspective taking. What the results suggest is that polarizing messages place us in a high state situation, a very critical situation that allows us to indicate to others whether or not we are part of their group, whether or not we are aligned. “Polarizing messages activated more cognitive resources and generated more activity in neural networks in the areas of the brain that allow us to adapt to the social environment.”
Likes also tend to reward highly emotional messages, the researcher points out, and in the long run the effect is that the entire political spectrum becomes radicalized. “The echo chambers of the networks feed political polarization, they make people organize in communities where the messages are very clear and visible.”
In these 15 years there have been multiple examples of modulation of the political message to the networks and of promiscuity between networks and politics, but perhaps no experiment as flagrant as that of the Brexit campaign. The creator of it, Dominic Cummings, knew how to make an almost Machiavellian use of 'like'. “What Cambridge Analytica [the Big Data company that helped modify the result of the referendum] was selling, that they were capable of changing governments, almost carrying out coups d'état through Facebook, was not entirely true,” believes Marta Peirano, who yes. recognizes the company's ability to find, via Facebook, people who had never voted, who were not part of the traditional pools of voters of the two major British parties, but who did have Facebook and expressed their fears and passions there. Precisely through likes and comments, those passions and fears were exploited, to convince them that they were not outcasts, but rather a political category that was voting for Brexit.”
When, already in 2009, it became clear that the 'like economy' had been established, the media had to start competing with the rest of the content, those generated by brands and those generated by the users themselves, within the same market, the Facebook feed, and they chose, in large part, to adapt their product. “The media fired journalists or even went bankrupt because they couldn't compete on Facebook, or because they didn't want to change their coverage as it demanded. “Facebook played a role in the dismantling of the local newspaper network and the rise of manipulative clickbait websites, and also in the shift of the media sphere towards a more manipulative discourse,” concluded an article on the history of the 'Like' button. ' published by Fast Company in 2021.
Jeff Jarvis, media analyst and founder of the website Buzz Machine, believes that liking originally has an “empowering effect” on the media consumer, although one that he describes as “trivial.” “His reaction is summarized in a binary way, I like it or I don't like it. I still remember the debate in those early years because there were people who demanded that there be a dislike button, but it was seen as something too negative. In the end, users found a way to be much more negative.”
The analysis of the effects of likes and their epigones usually focuses on the passive aspect, that is, on the desires and anxiety that come with waiting for them, the instant happiness that comes from receiving them, and the frustration that comes from not doing them. But the other aspect is rarely emphasized: whoever receives 'Likes' can also give them, exercising, even in a highly mediated way (which is why the networks decide to serve them as content) a certain voice as a consumer and opinionator, and also as a social being. .
The like is, in the end, the heir of the much more innocent poke, that system that the original Facebook had – which, let's not forget, was born to compare the physique of university girls and decide if they were “good” or not – so that the people who connected there would say to each other: I like you.
