The issue is it being removed for hand wavy reasons.

The trend is increased control through corporations and a reduced mass signal potential. This action is but one of many. Reddit modified r/All a while back to avoid mass signalling and or prioritize "authoritative" front page material.

Others have done similar things.

Twitter put features in for "authorities" to be marked in ways, verified users. Also, provided for broadcast only type posts, where comments are limited to a select few, or not at all allowed.

It's worth a deeper look back too:

Prior to the Internet, and prior to the actions of Reagan and Clinton to deregulate media, we had many independent publishers doing news, commentary (with fairness requirements on said commentary), and other works. No one was allowed to own a significant portion of all that, and the check and balance was all the peers questioning one another as well as the targets of their journalism.

Additionally, news was done as a public service, in the public interest, and that's what broadcast licenses were all about. They get a magic money machine in return for helping us all in a civic way by doing news.

After Reagan repealed the fairness doctrine, we got the likes of Rush Limbaugh.

Side bar: Limbaugh was an exemplary broadcaster. His unusual talent essentially unbridled by the lack of the fairness doctrine allowed for intoxicatingly good political talk. Just saying, his own skill was a factor in all this. End side bar.

After Clinton relaxed ownership rules, mega networks were born, and very quickly gobbled up a lot of news networks and also began doing news for profit, made possible by the larger network size as well as no need to be fair, or even accurate in news and or commentary.

Side bar: Fox won in court when challenged on it's right to force journalists to lie and or produce material they themselves do not believe in. This can and is a condition of employment. End side bar.

With the rise of the Internet came "new media" and the most striking quality was the population once again getting news and commentary produced from a labor, or populist point of view. This has naturally proven quite popular, and quite painful for big corporate media who is not used to having to deal with both feed back and competition not playing by the same rules it plays by.

Populists shot right to the top of the charts and captured younger media consumers, starting with a lot of Gen X and younger. Corporate media, big networks saw aging demographics, and the trend was clear.

They either need to find a way to compete, or new media was gonna have to be handicapped before it was too late!

And that's one trend, biasing mass signaling away from that which could challenge, or dissent from the establishment narrative.

Removing likes is straight up hiding the fact that big media being called authoritative, allowed to fact check without itself being fact checked to the same standards, or by those it has some authority over, is all very unpopular and not trusted very well at all and the demographics on that extend all the way up through old age today.

The young people don't even bother watching. Older people are questioning it all with increased frequency.

Putting it all on You Tube went like most of us thought it would: Yawn.

Bundling it with entertainment pulled the numbers up a little.

Modifying the recommendation algorithm pulled numbers up a bit more, while at the same time stunting the growth of new media in a painfully obvious way.

Still? No joy.

Now, hiding the data needed for the general public to understand those things along with increased censorship and rule changes intended to further hobble popular news and commentary that challenges the establishment is common and growing increasingly overt.

This brings us to present day "trends" and I hope a bit of context helps to understand what I am getting at here.