X Premium users have been able to hide the posts they’ve liked for months now, but the feature may soon become the default for everyone. A director of engineering at X said the platform is making likes private in a Tuesday post, noting that public likes may be discouraging people from engaging with content that might be considered “edgy.” “Yeah, we are making likes private,” Wang said in a tweet. “Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior.
Senator Ted Cruz’s Twitter account once liked a pornographic video, but then he blamed a staffer and said “It’s not going to happen again.” Samuel L. Jackson was once caught liking hardcore pornography but then unliked all of them once his fans warned him they were public. And of course, Musk’s own public likes have placed him in hot water before. In 2022, Musk liked an anti-trans tweet from the notorious right-wing account, Libs of TikTok.