Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey praised Facebook's experimental moves to hide Instagram 'likes'

AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.

• Twitter chief Jack Dorsey praised Instagram's experiments with hiding likes in the US on Saturday.
• Instagram has been trialling making likes private in several countries over the past year, and is now planning to expand its trial to a "small portion" of US Instagram users, according to a tweet sent on Friday by Instagram head Adam Mosseri.
• In a retweet of Instagram chief Adam Mosseri's Friday tweet, Twitter CEO Dorsey comment: "Great step."
• Dorsey has not been shy in criticizing Instagram's parent company Facebook recent months, criticizing its stance on political ads and its corporate rebrand.
• Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.

Twitter founder Jack Dorsey has praised Instagram's decision to experiment with hiding likes in the US.

Instagram has been trialling making likes private in several countries over the past year, including Australia, Ireland and Italy, and is now planning to expand its trial to a "small portion" of US Instagram users, according to a tweet sent on Friday by the firm's head Adam Mosseri.

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The like-hiding idea is simple: while the person who published a particular post will be able to see who has liked that post, that person's followers will not.

On Saturday, Dorsey signalled his approval for the move, retweeting Mosseri's Friday tweet while adding the words "Great step."

Dorsey has not been shy in trolling Facebook, Instagram's parent firm, in recent weeks.

In October, he attacked Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg over Facebook's policy of allowing lies in political ads which run on the platform. Taking aim at Zuckerberg's prior claim that Facebook was founded with the goal of facilitating political expression, Dorsey called it "revisionist history."

On the day of Facebook's third-quarter financial results and as the firm faced a growing furore around political ads, Dorsey also announced that Twitter would ban all political ads from its platform.

And more recently, he parodied Facebook's decision to alter its corporate logo to "FACEBOOK", tweeting "Twitter from TWITTER" in an obvious jibe.

But Dorsey has previously signalled that he, too, is reconsidering whether Twitter should publicise popularity metrics such as like and retweet counts. He has questioned the wisdom of having a "a big Like button with a heart on it". Twitter has denied that it plans to kill off the like button altogether, but confirmed it's looking at the tool as part of wider moves to "healthy conversation."

Speaking at the Wired25 tech conference last week, Mosseri explained the reasons for Instagram's decision.

"It's about young people," Mosseri said. "The idea is to try to 'depressurize' Instagram, make it less of a competition and give people more space to focus on connecting with people that they love, things that inspire them."

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Instagram head Adam Mosseri wants to "depressurize" Instagram for young people.

"It means we're going to put a 15-year-old kid's interests before a public speaker's interest," he added. "When we look at the world of public content, we're going to put people in that world before organizations and corporations."