Good news for politicians, celebrities, and everyone else who doesn’t know how to be private on social media: your Twitter “likes” have disappeared from the public eye! Now Ted Cruz can get back to his favorite hobby.
Elon Musk announced this week that the “Likes” tab on Twitter/X (whoever is calling it that) will be hidden so you can’t just go to your friend’s page and see what they’ve been looking at lately. Instead, you have to do that mature thing and just ask them what they like, apparently.
Users can still see their own likes, and who liked their Tweets, but you cannot just go to someone else’s profile anymore and see what they’ve been liking. You can assume they like Venom Horse, but you can’t really know anymore.
This week we’re making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy.
– You will still be able to see posts you have liked (but others cannot).
– Like count and other metrics for your own posts will still show up under notifications.
– You will no longer see who…
— Engineering (@XEng) June 11, 2024
An engineer at X claims that “public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be “edgy” in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.” So people should not feel discouraged to like Venom Horse tweets without fear that Venom Horse himself will come after them. This also gives people a free pass to just like anything, which never ends well.
This is another nail in the coffin for Musk, who has been steadily making the site unusable since he purchased it in 2022 for $44 billion. Now it is worth a lot less than that.