X is now hiding what posts users like from other users.
The news was made official in a post Wednesday morning from Elon Musk as the site update was being rolled out.
“Important change: your likes are now private,” Musk said, quoting an explanation posted by the company’s engineering account on Tuesday.
According to the post, users will still be able to see which posts they have liked themselves and who liked their own posts, but not who liked someone else’s posts.
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On Wednesday, the tab on most users’ profiles showing what posts they had liked had disappeared.
The Verge first previewed the change on Tuesday, and Musk confirmed the news by resharing a screenshot of the article.
Haofei Wang, X’s director of engineering, had teased the update in a post on May 21.
“Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior,” Wang wrote. “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.”
He added that if users now more freely like posts they’re interested in, X’s algorithm will become more tailored to them.
In subsequent posts, Musk and X echoed that reasoning for the change.
The update follows a flurry of policy updates Musk has introduced to the platform since taking over in 2022.
In March, Musk said that he eventually plans for posts on X to only show the view count instead of that of likes and retweets as well. So far, there appears to be no changes to the retweets feature and like counts are still available.
Some other social media platforms have also moved to make likes more private. A few years ago, Instagram had a Following Activity tab, where people could see which posts users they followed liked, all in one place. It has since removed the tab and given users the ability to hide the like count on posts they create.
However, users are still able to see who liked a specific post on Instagram.
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