Instagram might be expanding dislike button for comments test to more users

Reports online suggest that Instagram might be quietly expanding its comment dislike button to more users. The platform first started this test last year with a very small number of accounts, and since then, we haven’t seen or heard much about it until now.

A big pop culture account on X posted about the rollout today, and upon some further digging, we found reports slowly surfacing about the rollout in the past few weeks.

Here’s another post from a user in Costa Rica who shared a screenshot of the buttons showing up yesterday:

There is also a post from May 5 where one user joked about the sheer panic of getting a notification that someone disliked their comment.

We found another couple of reports from way back in April showing the exact same button appearing in the app.

It appears Meta is ready to scale this up. Instagram head Adam Mosseri originally confirmed the test in February 2025. Back then, it was restricted to a very small group of people.

The mechanics are pretty straightforward. Tapping the dislike button does not display a public count. No one knows who clicked it, and the original commenter is not notified.

It just acts as a backend signal for the algorithm. If enough people downvote a specific comment, Instagram will eventually push it lower down the ranking so fewer people have to see it.

Instagram comment sections can be notoriously toxic, and hiding the worst stuff automatically is probably a smart move, at least in the eyes of the platform.

Downvoting is quickly becoming the default way social platforms handle terrible replies. X began widely rolling out its own dislike button for replies earlier this year.

The version on X works a bit differently. Pressing it pulls up a feedback sheet asking if the reply is spam or AI-generated. But the end goal is exactly the same.

Both platforms are clearly trying to clean up replies without paying human moderators to read everything. Letting users bury annoying or spammy replies themselves is a much cheaper fix.

For now, Instagram has not put out an official statement about a global launch. 

We stand out from the tech-media crowd because we break news stories; we mainly bring you stuff that you won’t find anywhere in the mainstream tech media. Our stories have been picked up by some of the world’s most popular websites and media outlets—more info is available here.