Elon Musk promised and delivered. Likes, one of Twitter’s oldest and most popular features, will be hidden by default for all users. Following confirmation from X engineering director Haofei Wang, a new report claims that the social network will bury likes starting today.
A report of The Verge confirms that X will hide the “Like” section of user profiles. This tab, which groups all the posts you have liked, will be private by default. According to Elon Musk, the likes in X they are often used as a weapon to attack people.
“It’s important to allow people to like posts without being attacked for doing so!” said X’s boss on his account. For his part, Haofei Wang mentioned that the likes publics incentivize incorrect behavior. “Many people are deterred from liking content that may be ‘disturbing’ for fear of retaliation from trolls or to protect their public image,” the engineering director said.
Until a few months ago, the likes Private ones were only available to X Premium subscribers. The feature will now be rolled out to all users and will be enabled by default. It is important to mention that this feature does not remove likes from X.
Enrique Barragán, software engineer at X, clarified some doubts about the likes private. Users will be able to see who liked their posts, as well as the like count for all posts and replies. What will not be displayed will be the “Likes” tab or the people who liked another user’s post.
Elon Musk wants to get rid of likes on X
Elon Musk has plenty of reasons to get rid of likes. The tycoon considers that This function, implemented for more than a decade on Twitter, lost relevance. The likes and retweets They are part of a time when popularity was measured based on the number that appeared under your posts.
The head of X stated in March that only the view count would remain visible and be used as an indicator. Both Musk and Linda Yaccarino, CEO of X, have been promoting the number of views as the key metric for advertisers for months.
This sentiment was shared by one of the sources who leaked the arrival of private likes. “Social media in general is moving away from like counts, so this makes sense. Part of me thinks that [Elon Musk] he simply wants to disassociate himself more and more from Twitter,” he told The Verge.
Another point against this feature is that some celebrities or personalities receive attacks for “likes.” There are user groups dedicated to monitoring and hunting down likes that they consider compromising, especially if they are related to an ideology or support for political parties.
