Originally published for Broadly as part of my “Extremely Online” monthly column.
Not long ago, a viral story sent the internet into a frenzy: Mommy blogger Katie Bower expressed that her six-year-old son receives the least “likes” on Instagram out of all of her children. In a caption attached to his birthday weekend post, Bower wrote “It killed me inside. His photos never got as many likes. Never got comments. From a statistical point of view, he wasn’t as popular with everyone out there. Maybe part of that was the pictures just never hit the algorithm right.”