X Director of Engineering Haofei Wang says “we are making likes private” in an update happening “soon”, as “public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior”
Context & Ripple Effects
X had previously explored letting paid users hide Likes, including from its APIs, making this a broader extension of an earlier paid-user privacy option. The rationale now centers on the behavioral effects of making endorsement activity visible.
The proposed change was subsequently described as a platform-wide rollout: users would no longer be able to see who liked another person’s post in the later confirmation of private Likes. That makes the announcement a consequential redesign of X’s social-feedback layer rather than a narrow subscription feature.
First-order effects
- Users’ Like activity becomes less visible to other users, removing a public record of who endorsed a given post.
- X changes the incentive around liking: users can signal approval without exposing that choice to their audience, while the platform seeks to reduce behavior shaped by public Like visibility.
Second-order effects
- Creators, brands, and researchers lose an easily observable audience-affinity signal, making public engagement analysis less granular even if Likes remain part of the product’s internal feedback system.
- The move expands beyond X’s earlier paid-only approach, reducing one visible distinction between subscriber and non-subscriber privacy controls.
Third-order effects
- If platforms continue limiting visibility into individual engagement actions, public social graphs may become less useful as a source of reputational signaling and third-party audience intelligence.
- The change illustrates a broader product-governance trade-off: platforms can moderate socially performative behavior by making feedback more private, but at the cost of public transparency around influence and endorsement.
The trend: This is one data point in the shift from fully public engagement signals toward more platform-controlled, privacy-oriented conversational influence surfaces.