Elon Musk’s X, which was previously known as Twitter, is once again jacking up for a change no one had seemingly asked for.
This time, the “public likes” feature will be removed from every profile, meaning that other users won’t be able to see which tweets have been liked by a person.
Director of Engineering at the social website, Haofei Wang, has confirmed this decision, explaining that it’s meant to give more freedom to tweeters.
“Yeah, we are making likes private,” he wrote on X when the upcoming Elon Musk change was discussed by MacRumors researcher, Aaron Perris, in a post.
Going on, Haofei Wang added, “Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. Many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be ‘edgy’ in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.”
This is especially true for celebrities, who are closely scrutinized for every move on social media, specifically through their Instagram and X profiles.
Once upon a time, even Instagram had an activity corner where people could see what posts have been liked by a person they follow.
According to Mashable, Elon Musk thinks that removing the option from X will improve its For You algorithm, too.
As people will interact with preferred content more freely, algorithm will accurately learn what they actually want to see, giving them better filtered feeds.
