X Starts Hiding Likes on Posts, Says Privacy Will Encourage Free Speech

X, formerly known as Twitter, is changing the way post likes appear on users' profiles, starting this week. In a post on June 12, X's engineering team announced that the platform will make likes private by default for increased user privacy.

Making likes private means a user's liked tweets will only be visible to them and not displayed publicly to others on their profile page, as has been the case so far. While users can still see the tweets they've liked in the app and on the Web, these will no longer be publicly visible.

According to the post on the engineering team's handle:

1. Users can see posts they have liked, but others cannot

2. A user's post will still show like counts and other metrics

3. Users will no longer see who has liked other people's posts

4. Only a post's author can see who has liked it

X believes this change will give users more freedom to engage with a broader range of content without concerns over public pushback. According to X, the change is aimed at incentivising interactions by allowing people to privately support tweets without being worried about potential social repercussions.

The company had been transitioning to private likes after Director of Engineering Haofei Wang said in May that public likes could discourage users from engaging with "edgy" topics. The feature was previously only available to paying X subscribers, but will now be the default for all users as X says it is promoting and supporting free speech on the platform. However, critics claim this will make it easier for users to manipulate engagement metrics without being detected by using bots to boost their like counts.