Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) will soon stop displaying public “likes” on users’ profile pages, the company announced. The plan was confirmed on Wednesday by X engineers after MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris discovered a flag in X’s iOS app indicating the upcoming change.
Perris found that disabling the flag entirely removes the “Likes” tab from all user profiles. His discovery was shared on X and subsequently confirmed by X engineers.
“Yes, we are making likes private,” responded X’s director of engineering Haofei Wang. “Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. Many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be ‘edgy’ for fear of retaliation from trolls or to protect their public image. Soon you’ll be able to like without worrying who might see it,” Wang continued. “Also a reminder that the more posts you like, the better your ‘For you’ algorithm will become.”
To clarify user confusion, X senior software engineer Enrique Barragan posted that users will still be able to see who liked their posts and the like count for all posts and replies. The change involves hiding which posts other people liked, thereby removing the Likes tab from public profiles.
X Premium subscribers have had the option to hide the Likes tab on their profiles, but the platform is now set to remove it entirely. Although the exact timeline for this change is not clear, once implemented, everyone on X, including owner Elon Musk—who has faced criticism in the past for liking controversial posts—will be able to like content privately.
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