X Confirms Plan to Make 'Likes' Private, Remove Likes Tab From Profiles
X Confirms Plan to Make 'Likes' Private, Remove Likes Tab From Profiles
Social media platform X (formerly Twitter) will soon stop showing public "likes" on users' profile pages, the company has said. The plan...
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I'm not a big Twitter user to begin with, so I assumed based on the title that it was going to be similar to YouTube disabling the dislike counter.
This is making the list of posts you've "Liked" private. Saved you a click.
Personally I'd like this to be a toggleable feature like Reddit has (had?), but otherwise, yeah seems like an obtuse change, I don't understand the why behind it.
People might not want to make it obvious that they support Nazi shit. This will make it easier for them to do so covertly.
My guess is that its to cover up patterns of this to protect specific rich guys from lawsuits. As a bonus it means its easier to add and subtract likes from posts without leaving clear evidence.
So Elon himself can add 10,000 likes to an antisemitic post or subtract the likes from say somebody making fun of a cybertruck.
It will also make it easier to astroturf your own tweets and pay for likes.
The reason is probably that too many people got caught liking questionable content through the likes page.
The reason is that Elon Musk got caught liking questionable content through the likes page.
It also makes it nearly impossible for independent researchers to uncover bot networks and AstroTurfing, just in time for fully automated AI propaganda.
Besides what others say it also strenghtens monopoly on information, a resource used in research, but also valuable in creating hyped up LLMs (like Reddit did closing their API). Likes can be used to map which groups like what, which content is seen as valuable, singling out bot networks from organic reactions etc etc. This information enriches datasets you can gather (without paying Musk?).
I would probably vouch for that info to be accessible to either no one or anyone. Twitter is still a public square where politicians and orgs announce stuff and leave their official remarks, so it's more valuable if it's transparent. And we also had some scandals with famous douches liking controversal shit or just porn from their main accounts (:
It’s because Elon keeps getting caught out liking and boosting blatant white supremacist stuff. Who knows why. He really doesn’t seem to mind everyone knowing the fact that he’s a neo-Nazi.
"Huh, I hadn't really considered this [kinda racist when you think about it] view, but it's actually pretty popular [by bots] so maybe there's something to this!"
Likes and the like should be public, then there's no tampering and people who like the insane shit can't hide that fact. Dunno why people are still using that platform regardless.