Something to look forward to: Instagram is home to 1 billion+ active monthly users and reportedly has more than 25 million businesses running on the platform. Operating at such a massive scale presents big challenges that call for a great deal of moderation and guidelines to ensure a pleasant experience for every user. The company has recently updated its account disable policy with a new alert to warn users in violation of its guidelines and has added six more countries to the list where it's currently testing hiding Like counts for users so that people, especially youngsters, can be relieved of such stats on the surface and focus on sharing with people that they care about.

In a bid to provide a friendlier experience for everyone on Instagram, the company has updated its account disable policy and added a new alert to warn people who violate its community guidelines on hate speech or symbols. The warning details posts, comments and stories that Instagram removes along with reasons for their deletion. The new policy will also result in banning of user accounts where they exceed a set number of violations within a certain amount of time. Posting forbidden content is now one of those violations.

The social platform will allow users to lodge appeals against its moderation decisions directly through the alert, although for now, only certain content related to hate speech, drug sales and nudity, among other forbidden types, can be appealed with more options to be added in the future.

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The company has also expanded its testing of hiding Like counts to more countries. The trial that began with users in Canada has now been expanded to Australia, Brazil, Italy, Ireland, Japan and New Zealand. The motive behind this move is to reduce pressure on youngsters and improve their mental health as they no longer compete with others for Likes, which should also reduce their time spent on the platform. "We hope this test will remove the pressure of how many likes a post will receive, so you can focus on sharing the things you love," said Mia Garlick, Facebook's director of policy for Australia and New Zealand.

"Influencers" on the other hand, may call this controversial as Like counts on their posts usually tend to reflect their fame and presence on the social site. "They said they're doing it to take the competition out of posting - I'm not in competition with anyone on Instagram, I'm here to run a business," said one fitness and food influencer adding that hiding Likes would be demotivating for her.

Instagram notes that this test won't affect measurement tools for businesses, saying that "for business and creators on Instagram, this test will not affect measurement tools like Insights or Ads Manager," and that users can still see the list of people who like other people's content by clicking into it.