Why is Twitter removing likes? The ‘private likes’ situation, explained

Elon Musk promised major changes to Twitter when he bought the social media giant in 2022, and one significant update will soon come to pass. According to X engineer Haofei, “likes” will now be private for all users.

In March 2024, Musk threatened that X would remove “all the action buttons with their superfluous interaction counts from the main timeline,” including likes, but not the user count, and replace them with action-based interaction like taps and swipes. “This will greatly improve readability,” Musk said.

In an X post in May, X engineer Haofei added,

Yeah, we are making likes private. 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. Soon you’ll be able to like without worrying who might see it. Also a reminder that the more posts you like, the better your For you algorithm will become.

via Haofei/X

Senior software engineer Enrique Barragan clarified the change

Shortly after Haofei confirmed all likes would soon be private, X senior software engineer Enrique Barragan clarified the change. X users will still see likes on their posts. And “like” and “reply” counts will still be visible, Barragan wrote. After the change, he added, “[Y]ou cannot see the people who liked someone else’s post. [Y]ou cannot see others “Liked” tab on their profile.”

Meanwhile, user response was mixed. “The number of likes visible is a great indicator on whether something is worth reading or watching. I thought X was trying to encourage more engagement. You are taking away the critical signals of engagement and high quality content [sic],” Wall Street Silver commented.

“It’s genuinely impressive how you seem laser focussed on making this website worse and worse. What’s your secret? [sic],” Jimmy Rushton added. But Warface wrote in response to the news, “I heavily support this I wish that you guys would implement more features that are like this.” There’s no word yet when exactly this change will happen.