"Instagram will test hiding the number of likes and views that photos and videos receive — a central aspect of its platform — to rein in competitive tendencies and make the experience a little 'less pressurized.'"

"Instagram’s head, Adam Mosseri, said the change is designed to minimize the stress of posting online, where users can fixate on how many likes their videos draw. 'We want people to worry a little bit less about how many likes they’re getting on Instagram and spend a bit more time connecting with the people that they care about,' he said Tuesday during Facebook’s annual developer conference, F8.... Hiding the counts could potentially introduce new problems for users, such as diminishing the feeling of camaraderie from liking a popular post tied to a social cause or a massive in-joke.... Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey said last week that if he could build his social network anew, he would rethink its emphasis on likes and retweets as markers of success. In a prototype of the Twitter app, dubbed twttr, the company is experimenting with removing like and retweet counts by default."

WaPo reports.

Meanwhile, "Facebook bans extremist leaders including Louis Farrakhan, Alex Jones, Milo Yiannopoulos for being ‘dangerous’/The bans are a sign that the social network is more aggressively enforcing its hate speech policies under pressure from civil rights groups" (WaPo). That article has this interesting correction: "Louis Farrakhan is an extremist leader who has espoused anti-Semitic views. An earlier version of this story and headline incorrectly included him in a list of far-right leaders."

That correction had me spending some time reading Farrakhan's Wikipedia page — because I realized I couldn't really place him squarely on the right or the left. I learned some interesting things about him: 1. He's very old (85), 2. He's "speculated that his father.... may have been Jewish," 3. He was good enough as a child at playing the violin to win an award on the Ted Mack Original Amateur Hour (in 1946), 4. He's wife's name, originally, was Betsy Ross, 5. In the 50s, he was a professional  calypso singer  known as "The Charmer" and, later, "Calypso Gene," 6. After he joined the Nation of Islam, Elijah Muhammad required all members to "choose between music and the Nation of Islam," which he did, but only after doing one more music gig, at "a Jewish resort in the Catskills," 7. He originally supported Obama, but rejected him and called him "the first Jewish president" because of the  intervention in Libya ("We voted for our brother Barack, a beautiful human being with a sweet heart... Now he's an assassin"), 8. He embraces Dianetics and has said "All white people should flock to L. Ron Hubbard. You can still be a Christian; you just won't be a devil Christian. You can still be a Jew, but you won't be a satanic Jew," 9.  He said Hitler "wasn't great for me as a Black man but he was a great German and he rose Germany up from the ashes of her defeat by the united force of all of Europe and America after the First World War.... Now I'm not proud of Hitler's evil toward Jewish people, but that's a matter of record. He rose Germany up from nothing."