Instagram is testing a dislike button, but only for comments

Instagram is testing a new dislike button, which the company has signaled is a way for users to effectively downvote a distasteful or irrelevant comment. The dislike button is only for comments, and not the actual content itself. The platform is testing this with both Reels and Feed posts.

The service will not show a dislike count, though Instagram head Adam Mosseri says that dislikes will eventually contribute to comment ranking. In other words, this feature is most like the Reddit downvote button.

“This gives people a private way to signal that they don’t feel good about that particular comment,” Mosseri wrote on Threads. “Our hope is that this might help make comments more friendly on Instagram.”

A Meta spokesperson told TechCrunch that the primary purpose of the dislike button is to improve the quality of the comment section, echoing Mosseri’s post. This is just a test for now, so the button is only available to a “very small group of people.” It may get a broader rollout down the line.

Instagram has been busy in recent months. Platform representatives announced that it was working on a video-editing app that looks eerily-similar to TikTok’s sibling app, CapCut. The platform even expanded the length of Reels to three minutes, which was seen as another TikTok mimic. It also recently got rid of third-party fact checkers because of freedom or something.