Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk on Wednesday made an announcement that likes will now be ‘private’ on social media platform X, formerly Twitter.
“Important change: your likes are now private,” Elon Musk said after X Engineering account revealed the new changes.
Earlier, users on the social media platform could visit other users’ pages and check what they liked on the platform. Only premium users were offered privacy. With changes in the company’s policy, access to check likes has been restricted on the platform.
The post on X’s engineering account gave four key pointers about the new privacy policy as the notification stated, “This week we’re making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy.
From this week onwards, social media users will continue to access their own likes, but the general public will no longer be able to access another account’s likes. A notification about the change appeared on accounts on Wednesday, indicating that the ‘Likes’ tab would no longer be visible on others’ accounts.
Last month, X Engineering Director Haofei Wang signalled the upcoming privacy changes to ‘Likes’ on X as he claimed that public likes are incentivising wrong behaviour. He alleged that many people feel discouraged from liking “edgy” content in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.
