If you post a picture, and no one sees how many people liked it, does it still exist? Instagram users in the US are going to find out next week. Months after the company tested hiding "like" counts in Australia, Brazil, Canada, Ireland, Italy, Japan, and New Zealand, CEO Adam Mosseri announced today at WIRED25 that some Instagram users in America can expect their like counts to vanish from public view.

The company will begin testing next week, at first rolling out the change to a limited number of accounts.

Instagram isn’t the only company that is attempting to remove publicly available engagement metrics from their platform. Facebook (which owns Instagram), Twitter, and YouTube have all experimented with removing engagement metrics from their platforms. As WIRED previously reported, social media researchers have argued that when users tailor their content to whatever garners the most engagement (or outrage), the result is a radicalized environment that makes healthy, happy conversations almost impossible.

Hiding like counts is just the latest step in Instagram’s quest to become the safest place on the internet, along with algorithms and filters to remove offensive or divisive comments or pictures. But the move hasn’t come without panicked pushback from users, who, among other complaints, note that hiding engagement metrics will make it harder to determine whose follower count is legitimate.

WIRED's Arielle Pardes talked to Mosseri and actor and producer Tracee Ellis Ross, best known for her starring role in the television series Black-ish. Ross recently launched Pattern Beauty, a curly hair care company. Instagram sales serve as its main source of revenue, according to Ross.

Balancing the needs of artists, brands, and the average user is difficult. But Mosseri emphasized that Instagram will always place the needs of people first. "It means we’re going to put a 15-year-old kid’s interests before a public speaker’s interest," he says. "When we look at the world of public content, we’re going to put people in that world before organizations and corporations."

As a business owner who happens to rely on Instagram, Ross agrees. “As much as I love a high roller,” she said, laughing, “I think it has adverse effects. It creates a culture that isn’t helpful for well-being and isn’t fruitful for creative energy.”

Although Mosseri was careful to note that “bullying predates Instagram" and the internet, he did mention further measures that the platform is taking to improve the mental and emotional health of its users. The company is working with therapists and engineers to develop other tools to prevent and de-escalate bullying on the platform, such as figuring out a way to make users take a break when they need it.

Ross noted that there is one simple way to take a break: “I just take Instagram off my phone on the weekends,” said the actor, producer, CEO, and Instagram user with 7.1 million followers.

It’s still too early to gauge whether social media demetrication improves a user’s mental health or the quality of online discourse. Still, Instagram is quickly becoming the “mental health lab of our era,” as Pardes noted. If nothing else, it could be an important step to bringing users back to platforms that they have been using less frequently or abandoning.

This post was updated to clarify that Instagram is testing this feature, and later to add more detail from the conversation on stage.