- X has announced that it will make likes private for all users this week.
- The feature was previously limited to Premium subscribers alone, but is now being made widely available.
- Moving forward you will not be able to see who liked someone else’s posts on X.
Read enough X (formerly Twitter) bios these days and you’ll invariably come across the phrase, “views are my own”. This was a marker to signal that what an account posts should be viewed outside of any other context, such as who their employer may be, or what job they have.
Taking this a step further, in September of last year X announced that Premium subscribers would the ability to hide their likes, in an effort to increase privacy, but also as the social media platform noted, to “keep spicy likes private”.
Now this functionality, which was once part of a paid-for set of features, is rolling out to all users on the platform this week. X’s official Engineering account confirmed the news, stating that, “This week we’re making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy.”
The account added that, “You will still be able to see posts you have liked (but others cannot).”
On top of this, like counts and other metrics for a user’s own posts will still show up under notifications, and crucially you will no longer be able to see who liked someone else’s post. That said, a post’s author can still see who liked their own posts.
Naturally chief Twit, Elon Musk weighed in on the announcement, intimating that this feature being rolled out to all users would be a way to keep accounts from being probed over the content they may have liked on the platform in the past.
While it will be interesting to see how the wider X community reacts to this new feature being made available to all, of more interest at the moment is the fact that a once Premium subscriber tool is now leaving the confines of the paid-for environment.
Hopefully this does not become a trend for a social media platform pushing for more revenue, because as Engadget points out, there is now one less reason to pay for X Premium.
