Musk’s X officially starts anonymous likes for all users, the reason for this, pros and cons and much more…
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Sulaiman
- . June 13, 2024
- . Update: June 13, 2024 8:41 pm
Wednesday morning saw an update in Twitter (X) where all the likes were made anonymous, that means the user wouldn’t be able to see the accounts who are liking their posts.
In a statement Musk said, “Important change: your likes are now private.”
Reason behind the Change as per X’s Engineering Head
The reason behind this change as explained by the X’s engineering department Director Haofei Wang is, “Public likes are incentivising the wrong behaviour. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that is edgy in fear of retaliation by trollers or to protect their public image. Now everyone would be able to like posts without having to worry about facing online criticism.”
Elon Musk’s Comments on the Change
According to the post made by Musk, users would still be able to see which posts they have liked themselves, and who have liked their own posts. The change is only in that they won’t be able to see who has liked someone else’s posts. This can be a security added and beefing up the privacy of users.
It has been made clear that the platform’s algorithm would boost the posts to the users according to the likes given by them.
Since March 2024, Elon Musk said that he plans to eventually for posts to show only the number of views while erasing the number of likes and retweets. Although there seems to be no change as for those features as of now but it can come anytime in the near future as the platform has transformed itself into a very dynamic and evolving in nature after Musk took it over as CEO in 2022.
Other Applications applying the same features
It has been noted that other platforms have also implemented these changes to keep the privacy of its users. For example some years back, Instagram used to have a feature called Following Activity Tab, where people could see all the likes, comments and all from the accounts they followed in one place. The option now has been removed to hide the like count on posts the user creates.
Pros and cons of the New Feature and the debate
As per X’s engineering director, Musk asked them to get rid of tweet action buttons and emphasise on post views. This would help in getting rid of the likes and comments section as according to the CEO they weren’t important and only views were important so as to get more impressions increasing the reach of the post.
According to a source, social media is shifting away from numbers and focussing on the content quality thus views are being more important than the likes and comments. He also went on to say, Musk wants to disassociate more from Twitter.
According to Musk, the reach or impressions of posts has been soaring after the options have disappeared from the posts. This can be due to the fact that many people who hold posts in the government or are celebrities, couldn’t react to the posts before as their accounts and profile names would have popped up whenever they liked a post. This could have resulted in facing trolls or similar problems. But now, this problem has been solved by the X’s engineering department.
According to his X account, he posted this graph along with a caption stating the massive growth of number of likes. Check it out here;
This change launch has arrived after X reviewed and tweaked its policies allowing consensually produced and distributed adult nudity or sexual content on the social media platform. This is quite a disappropriate move by the company considering the stakes and visibility that all the posts get here.
Keep on Reading
The company’s new rules suggest that “users can create, distribute and consume material related to sexual themes but it has to be consensually validated and produced”. Accordingly, in March 2024, X started allowing admins of NSFW (not safe for work) adult communities to apply a “Adult Content” Label in order to avoid their post to get automatically filtered.
Although this labelling is an option to mark the content, it is quite a thing to ponder upon how this type of content can be allowed in the social media platforms like Twitter where all government officials and ministers maintain their accounts.
