The move to make “likes” private on Twitter — something first announced a few weeks ago — looks to finally be going live across the platform.
Elon Musk has made a lot of bad choices about how to run Twitter — including renaming it X! — but this one? This is good, actually.
Musk tweeted on Tuesday, responding to a post from The Verge that said likes would soon be hidden: “Important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!” He tweeted Wednesday: “Important change: your likes are now private.”
He’s right — there’s no big value in having likes be public, but there IS a big downside in terms of potential for embarrassment.
Likes had been visible in two places: on a person’s profile page, you had been able to see a tab of all the tweets that person liked through history. And on an individual tweet, you could see who liked it.
The former is more likely to cause some embarrassment. Let’s keep in mind that most users probably don’t really think about the idea of likes being public, and have no clue that their profile publicly lists all their past likes.
Consider, for a moment, Vince Neil, the singer of Motley Crüe. Neil isn’t particularly active on the platform; his last tweet was from March 31, saying, “Happy Easter everyone!”
But in the last week or so, the TikTok Crüniverse (I just made that term up; that’s not a thing, but honestly … you’d be surprised how much Motley Crüe content is on TikTok) has been abuzz about Neil’s X account. Someone noticed that his likes tab has a few tweets of adult content.
I don’t mind sharing this because I think that Vince Neil, who has made his immense sexual appetites part of his personal mythos and has also gotten a facelift as part of a VH1 reality show, is unlikely to be immensely humiliated by this.
But other people might feel very embarrassed if their likes of adult content were discovered. Musk is right: People should feel free to like stuff without embarrassment.
Musk might like us to think that empowering people to like things privately is more about the freedom to like unpopular speech without repercussion. Musk has personally offered to pay the legal bills of people fired for their tweets or likes. However, the legal cases Musk is helping with — with actress Gina Carano and a former Square employee — are from people allegedly fired over posts they wrote themselves, not their likes.
I think this it’s a bit of free speech LARPing to think that removing public likes is meant to protect people who like a tweet with some edgy “wrongthink” ideas. That’s not what is causing huge problems in private people’s lives. Let’s be realistic: It’s getting caught liking porn. And X is now happy to be encouraging porn consumption on the platform — just last month, they created guidelines for adult content. Nudity and porn was never banned on Twitter, but this was the first time that an unofficial policy of allowing it had been formalized.
Instagram, a platform that is far hornier than X, despite its ban on nudity, used to have a feature where you could see the stream of activity and likes from the people you followed. That was like a sting operation for the thirsty, ruining all sorts of relationships. Eventually, in 2019, Instagram killed the feature.
Liking a sexy tweet isn’t a thought crime, but it’s very likely to be embarrassing. Shutting down the public likes is long overdue. For once, as much as it pains me to say, Elon has it right.
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