X (Twitter) will soon remove the ability to see what posts other users have liked.
Elon Musk, the platform’s owner, confirmed plans to do so in March, and now, the company is outlining them in more detail. In an X post, Haofei Wang, the company’s director of engineering, claimed that “public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior.”
As an example of this, he says “many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be ‘edgy’ in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.”
In a separate post, X senior software engineer Enrique Barragan clarified that the following changes are being made:
– 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
On the one hand, X is far from the only popular platform to explore changes to like visibility, with Meta’s Facebook and Instagram giving users the option to hide like counts on posts. In those cases, Meta says it was doing so to curb feelings of low self-esteem, especially among younger users.
However, it’s easy to see why Musk — who constantly cries about the totally legitimate “woke mind virus” — would push back against likes. After all, the so-called free speech maven has gone after people chronicling the rise of hateful tweets on the platform following his takeover. With that in mind, why wouldn’t he want to make it harder for people to be held accountable for liking blatantly awful posts on X?
Musk himself has been caught liking plenty of questionable posts (not to mention sharing them).
Elon Musk wants to make likes private because he’s been caught liking this kinda stuff before https://t.co/XxckzzDH2r pic.twitter.com/e9MgTsIlC5
— 679 Enthusiast (@marionumber4) May 22, 2024
Of course, this also benefits people who engage with NSFW content, such as U.S. senator Ted Cruz and actor Samuel L. Jackson, both of whom were caught liking pornographic posts on X.
It’s unclear exactly when public likes will be removed from X, but it’s the latest in a string of platform changes that have been made seemingly at random by Musk. This includes the removal (and return) of headlines on shared news stories, a mandatory dark mode that was quickly made optional and plans to prevent you from blocking other users.
Source: Haofei Wang Via: The Verge
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