On a recent afternoon, Adam Mosseri, the head of Instagram, assembled members of his staff to discuss the secret details of a critical project: the elimination of public ''likes.'' You'll be able to see how many hearts your posts get, dear user, but not other people's tallies. The effort is referred to internally as ''Project Daisy'' -- as in ''Does she love me? Or love me not?''

Likes are the social media currency undergirding an entire influencer economy, inspiring a million Kardashian wannabes and giving many of us regular people daily endorphin hits. But lately, Mr. Mosseri has been concerned about the unanticipated consequences of Instagram as approval arbiter.

He kept thinking about an episode of ''Black Mirror,'' the British dystopian anthology series, in which the characters rate everyone they interact with on a scale of 1 to 5 stars. (It doesn't end well.)

Mr. Mosseri knows something about dealing with dystopian tech fallout. He came to Instagram in October 2018 after years overseeing the Facebook News Feed, an unwitting engine of fake news, inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation. He wants to avoid similar pitfalls at Instagram, which is owned by Facebook.

But making likes private will be a major shift for Instagram's more than 1 billion users, for whom daily assessment of one another's popularity has become like breathing.

And so the company is carefully considering how this will happen, for months ''dog-fooding'' (internal Insta-talk for testing) different variations of the new format. A post's achievement of ''thousands of likes'' or ''tens of thousands of likes'' might still be public. Users might be still be able to find others' likes with a little more digging in the app. But the average teenager under pressure to be popular won't need to suffer the indignity of only his mom liking his skateboarding post.

Mr. Mosseri sees Project Daisy, which the company intends to introduce early this year, as a signal to the world that he has learned from Facebook's mistakes and is thinking about the larger, potentially corrosive impact of social media.

''We should have started to more proactively think about how Instagram and Facebook could be abused and mitigate those risks,'' he said. ''We're playing catch-up.''

In the meeting, he asked his team: ''How do we depressurize the app?'' Brands would still need to count likes for their advertising, so what would that look like? Nobody wanted to break up the ''BeyHive'' (Beyoncé's 138 million followers) or upset a major influencer like Selena Gomez (166 million), but does that mean the average popular teenager with 1,000 followers will see a similar display? How would users outside the United States respond? At one point, Mr. Mosseri stopped a designer and asked, ''But how would that look in other languages?''

Then, he exhaled, stretched his arms behind his head and said, ''I just don't want to piss anyone off.''

By then, I had spent several afternoons with Mr. Mosseri, and his concern struck me as the best encapsulation of his fascinating, sometimes fraught...