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Is Liking Someone Else’s Story Cheating?

BYKhaoula Ghanem

July 23, 2026

There are few things I enjoy more than scrolling through X, formerly known as Twitter, and watching complete strangers argue with absolute conviction about subjects that probably did not exist fifteen-years-ago (who should ride shotgun between your wife and mother, etc.). Recently, I came across a debate over whether liking someone else’s Instagram or Snapchat Story constitutes infidelity. While some dismissed it as an entirely meaningless interaction, others argued that if you are seeking another person’s attention while in a relationship, the intention matters more than the action itself. The discourse itself interested me far more than either answer because it raised a much bigger concern: The death of the neutral interaction.

20-years-ago nobody wondered whether acknowledging another person’s existence for a fraction of a second amounted to betrayal. Today, a gesture that requires almost no effort has become capable of igniting arguments and ending relationships.

French philosopher Roland Barthes once wrote that “language is a skin.” Meaning, we touch one another through words, gestures, and symbols long before we ever make physical contact. Social media has dramatically expanded that symbolic language. Every reaction, every emoji, every follow, every playlist save, every late night like, and every Story view now functions as a communicative act, regardless of whether the person performing it intended any communication whatsoever.

The difficulty lies in the fact that these gestures exist without the context that usually gives human interaction meaning. For example, a smile across a room comes with countless social cues that help us interpret intention. Meanwhile, an Instagram Story like arrives stripped of all information. Instead, what remains is a tiny digital footprint that demands interpretation because it provides so little certainty.

That uncertainty has encouraged an entirely new form of reading. Literary theorists spend their careers analyzing subtext, symbolism, and implied meaning inside novels. Increasingly, ordinary people perform a similar exercise inside their relationships, except instead of interpreting poetry, they interpret notifications.

Perhaps we have become amateur semioticians without realizing it. Semiotics— the study of signs and symbols— rests on the understanding that meaning is never inherent but is produced through interpretation. A Story like does not possess an objective definition any more than a wink or a smile does. Meaning emerges through culture, circumstance, and personal experience. That helps explain why one couple barely notices Story likes while another considers them unacceptable. They are reading the same sign through entirely different frameworks.

Social media platforms like Instagram and Snapchat have made those frameworks infinitely more crowded because they preserve interactions that would once have disappeared almost immediately. The result is a strange inversion of intimacy where we no longer remember interactions solely because they mattered, but because platforms documented them. Who liked whose Story, who watched first, who viewed every upload without responding, who suddenly stopped engaging altogether. None of these details disappear naturally because the platforms ensure they remain visible long enough for someone to notice patterns.

Technology writer Shoshana Zuboff argues in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism that digital platforms profit by collecting, organizing, and monetizing human behavior. While her work primarily addresses corporations rather than relationships, it offers an unexpectedly useful lens through which to understand modern romance. Social media companies have transformed countless ordinary interactions into measurable data points. Once behavior becomes measurable, people inevitably begin assigning significance to measurements that previously did not exist.

At the same time, this doesn’t mean that concerns about Story likes are irrational. In an era where approaching a stranger in person increasingly feels like a social transgression and even sending a direct message risks appearing overly eager, the Story like occupies an unusually comfortable middle ground. It signals interest without demanding vulnerability, making it both conspicuous enough to be noticed and ambiguous enough to be denied. We read too much into Story likes because Story likes have become one of the few socially acceptable ways to express tentative romantic interest without exposing ourselves to outright rejection.

Perhaps this explains why the language of “micro cheating” has become so widespread during the past decade. Before social media, attraction generally required deliberate effort. Today, intimacy has fragmented into dozens of microscopic interactions that occupy an uncomfortable gray area such as Story likes, Close Friends lists, disappearing messages, Spotify follows, and TikTok reposts, which all exist somewhere between complete innocence and unmistakable flirtation. None of these features were designed to measure fidelity, yet they have collectively produced an entirely new relationship vocabulary where ambiguity itself has become a form of communication.

We therefore compensate by constructing narratives from incomplete information, convinced that enough digital breadcrumbs will eventually reveal the whole story. Alas, human relationships have never functioned that way. They continue to rely upon trust, communication, and sometimes accepting that another person’s intentions cannot be reverse engineered from a notification.

Is Liking Someone Else’s Story Cheating?

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Is Liking Someone Else’s Story Cheating?

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