Elon Musk makes likes on posts private on X to boost engagement on platform

Private likes on X arrives after Elon Musk told the engineers working for the platform that he wanted to remove the tweet action buttons and wanted to shift focus to impressions

Elon Musk-owned social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has started making likes on posts private in a bid to drive user engagement on the platform. Limited to premium subscribers before, the feature is now being rolled out widely and it will arrive to everyone with an account on the platform. Touted by the platform as a measure to boost users' privacy, private likes will hide the identity of the users that have liked a post.

Now, you will be able to see posts you have liked, but others cannot. Moreover, you will not be able to see who likes someone else’s post. However, a post’s author could see who liked its post and like count and other metrics for your own posts will still show up under notifications.

The new feature arrives after Elon Musk told the engineers at X that he wanted to remove the tweet action buttons and wanted to shift focus to impressions.

The hiding of likes is a way to let users protect their public image. Haofei Wang, Director of Engineering at X in May confirmed the move stating public likes are incentivising wrong behaviour on the platform. He also added, “many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be “edgy” in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image”.

Enrique Barragan, senior software engineer had also taken to X to clarify that users will be able to see the number of posts and replies on their own post but likes of users will not be visible on other posts.

Likes impact the algorithm and the user is shown similar posts to the one that is liked most and this feature will result in curation of a timeline similar to their interests.