X (Twitter) Now Hides Posts Liked By Users

Tom Jowitt,
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Elon Musk’s X platform (formerly Twitter) has this week begun hiding user likes, amid reports of declining engagement

Elon Musk’s X (formerly known as Twitter) has this week made a notable change to the platform by hiding likes from other users.

The move was tweeted by X’s engineering team earlier this week, who claimed it was “making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy.”

It means that a user will still be able to see posts they have liked (but others cannot) on their profile page. The platform added that “like count and other metrics for your own posts will still show up under notifications,” but that “you will no longer see who liked someone else’s post.”

X Twitter logo Image credit X ex
Image credit: X

Hidden likes

The change came into force on Wednesday, after X’s engineering team confirmed the development.

Until this change, it was only Premium users who were able to hide their likes from other users.

Some users have also reportedly received a pop-up notification that seemed to suggest the change would result in more user engagement.

“Liking more posts will make your ‘For you’ feed better,” the message apparently read.

Declining engagement?

But the move comes amid research data that suggests that fewer people are using Elon Musk’s platform since his takeover.

In March this year NBC News reported on a research report from San Francisco-based Sensor Tower, which revealed that in February 2024, X had 27 million daily active users of its mobile app in the US, down 18 percent from a year earlier.

The Sensor Tower data revealed that the US user base has been flat or down every month since November 2022 (the first full month of Musk’s owning the app).

And in total the US user numbers are down 23 percent since that time, Sensor Tower reportedly said.

It comes after X, under Elon Musk, relaxed its content moderation rules that previously limited hateful content, and indeed controversial users.

X did not respond to this NBC News report or the research data, but the platform had tweeted that the worldwide number is higher than what Sensor Tower data shows, with 250 million people using X every day globally.

That would still be a decrease from the stated 258 million users when Musk bought the app.

Sensor Tower also noted that many advertisers have left X, with 75 out of the top 100 US advertisers on X from October 2022 having ceased ad spending on it.

The exodus reportedly spiked toward the end of 2023, after Musk publicly embraced an antisemitic conspiracy theory and then shocked everyone when he told advertisers at a conference in New York, “Go f— yourself.”