X Makes All “Likes” Private To Prevent “Retaliation”

June 12, 2024 Extremists, Social Media

Mashable reports:

X, formerly Twitter, has officially started hiding public “likes” on posts. X’s director of engineering Haofei Wang confirmed the news, saying in a post, “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. You’ll be able to like without worrying who might see it.”

Read the full article.

Aside from protecting people from backlash for liking, say, pro-Hitler and racist content, this change will also dissuade users from encouraging content that that they agree with since likes will now be anonymous.

But obviously, the main intent of this move is to elevate the posts of extremists, as you can plainly see by the post below by X’s official account.



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