Elon Musk is making another big change at X: hiding users' liked tweets from public view.
The change, which is rolling out this week, is intended to protect user privacy, according to X's engineering team. "You will still be able to see posts you have liked (but others cannot)," they said.
As a result, users can expect Twitter to remove the "Likes" tab from people's profiles. The tab was often a useful way to find out if a celebrity, including Musk, liked a controversial tweet. But last month, Twitter engineer Haofei Wang mentioned that the company would make likes private to stop potential shaming.
"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," Wang said at the time. "Soon you'll be able to like without worrying who might see it."
On Tuesday, Musk echoed that sentiment. "Important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!" he tweeted.
In the early days of Twitter, many people used the like button to bookmark tweets for future reference. That sometimes gave the false impression that they endorsed the message, especially after Twitter changed the like icon from a star to a heart in 2015. Three years later, Twitter finally rolled out a formal Bookmark feature, which lets people tag tweets without alerting the author or making the saves public.
Despite the demise of the like tab, like counts will remain on tweets, according to another Twitter engineer, Enrique Barragan. But only the author of a tweet will be able to see who liked a post.
Those who pay for the X Premium tier have already been able to hide their likes tab.
Musk has previously talked about a more drastic overhaul for the X interface that would also hide the retweet and like buttons. "Just view count will show, unless you tap into a post. This will greatly improve readability,” he said in October.