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”
Musk could soon make likes on X private, changing a feature that historically placed several celebrities, including him, into scandals.
Context & Ripple Effects
X had already tested selective control over the signal: paid users were previously slated to hide Likes, including from APIs, in an earlier paid-tier Likes privacy plan. This update points to a platform-wide change rather than an optional account setting.
The subsequent coverage shows the proposal moved quickly into execution, with a stated timetable for private Likes followed by confirmation that the setting applied to everyone. The change matters because Likes are both a personal activity record and a visible social cue.
First-order effects
- Users would no longer be able to inspect which accounts liked another person’s post, reducing public visibility into an account’s endorsement and browsing behavior.
- X changes the function of the Like from a publicly attributable profile signal to a primarily private feedback action, consistent with Wang’s stated concern about behavior shaped by public Likes.
Second-order effects
- Creators, brands, and public figures lose an easy way to monitor visible supporter lists around posts, so the public evidence of affinity shifts toward replies, reposts, and other observable actions.
- The move removes a privacy distinction that X had previously considered a paid-user benefit, potentially narrowing one visible reason to subscribe while applying the behavioral change across the service.
Third-order effects
- If platforms continue to limit public engagement histories, social metrics may become less useful as identity and affiliation signals even as they remain valuable for platform-internal ranking and measurement.
- This is part of a broader shift toward governing who can see expressions of approval; the trade-off is likely to remain between user privacy and the transparency that researchers, creators, and users derive from public interaction data.
The trend: Platforms are increasingly redesigning visible engagement signals as privacy and incentive mechanisms rather than treating them as neutral public metrics.