You can now hide your likes on X. Private likes have started rolling out on Twitter, meaning your likes may be hidden by default. The option available to X premium users now will be rolled out to all users. Elon Musk said that it was important for people to like posts without being attacked.
X’s director of engineering, a few weeks back said that the change was meant to protect people’s public image — because “many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be “edgy” in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.”
X users will now be able to like posts and increase the like count, but they won’t see who liked a post. According to Enrique Barragan, a senior software engineer at X:
- – you will be able to see who liked your posts
- – you can see the like count for all posts/replies / etc
- – you cannot see the people who liked someone else’s post
- – you cannot see others “Liked” tab on their profile
The decision to hide likes was probably made after several embarrassing encounters with high-profile users such as Texas Sen. Ted Cruz and Chinese Ambassador to the UK Liu Xiaoming both liked pornographic content – the Chinese Ambassador also liked several posts criticizing the Chinese Communist Party, according to BBC News. X CEO Elon Musk also had his share of embarrassment from liking transphobic posts.
In a raft of changes, Musk asked the platform’s engineers to remove the like and repost action buttons and instead focus on tweet impressions. “Social media in general is shifting away from like counts, so this makes sense,” the source said. “Part of me thinks [Musk] just wants to disassociate from Twitter more and more.”
From changes like removing the ability to block users, removing headlines from news posts and removing verified accounts, Musk has been making sweeping changes on the platform, possibly to make it his ideal version of Twitter.
