Likes on X now hidden: is anonymity really the answer?

The decision by X (formerly Twitter) to anonymise users’ likes on the platform last month came as quite a surprise to many people. The Washington Post described it as “the end of an era”. This move, which doesn’t actually usher in complete anonymity, as post authors can still see who likes their content, is part of a broader trend of dramatic changes that Elon Musk has overseen at the social media company since buying it and replacing the famous blue bird with the rather more mysterious and inexplicable ‘X’. The platform has described this most recent change in a purely positive light, as something which it claims will ‘better protect users’ privacy’. It does, however, raise lots of questions about what it really means to ‘like’ something virtually, and whether privacy on the internet should extend to anonymity on social media.

The ‘like’ on X, Instagram and Facebook is peculiar insofar as it has no single equivalent in the non-virtual world

Firstly, what really is a like? Pressing that little heart at the bottom of a post has long been seen to indicate your agreement, at least to some extent, with its contents. This has led many politicians, journalists, and others to specify in their bios variations of ‘likes/retweets don’t equal endorsements’, wary of them being interpreted as such. The ‘like’ on X, Instagram and Facebook is peculiar insofar as it has no single equivalent in the non-virtual world, and therefore doesn’t translate well into communication in the world outside of social media. And so, the debate over whether it should be visible to others is actually more of a debate about what sort of (virtual) environment we want social media to be.

It is perhaps naïve to expect that the conventional ways of communicating approval are fully encapsulated by the humble ‘like’. After all, we expect so much of it: when responding to sad news, it is supposed to convey solidarity and sympathy, whilst in other circumstances it is a marker of approval. Yet what users like seems to be less an expression of their preferences than it is of their interactions, the content they see and engage with on a daily basis. Through what we like, we are effectively telling the web of trackers on which social media is built that we want to see more of that type of content, hence why it is so easy to get stuck in echo chambers, where users are only scrolling through posts they agree with. Making likes anonymous isn’t going to change this tracking – as X has already said, what a user likes will still be used to tailor the content they’re shown, with more likes meaning more personalisation.

What, then, has actually changed? A small but controversial detail: a move away from the notion that likes are a public form of engagement, a way for people to openly put on record their approval, or even simply an interaction, with a post. Rather than being completely about privacy, it seems that anonymising likes also feeds into the fixation on the number of likes, rather than who those likes come from, which already defines social media. A large number of likes can add a false sense of legitimacy to posts and, in a blow to investigative journalism, it is now no longer possible to tell which accounts have liked what. The US Department of Justice only recently accused Russia of operating nearly 1,000 fake, AI-generated bot accounts to impersonate Americans and spread misinformation about the war in Ukraine. Given that impersonation has previously been an issue for X, especially in the aftermath of Elon Musk’s disastrous decision to remove blue tick verification for trusted accounts in favour of a confusing multicoloured tick system, it seems unwise for it to continue its march towards anonymity.

Political parties and journalists, too, made extensive use of the previously public nature of likes

What is most surprising is that this seems to come at a time when identifiability on social media has become more important than ever before. The rise in fake news, misleading posts, and downright lies around the wars in Gaza, Ukraine, and the UK general election just weeks ago has made it more important for us to verify where we get our news from online. This move by X therefore disrupts and challenges the wider social role that the likes tab had come to play, for instance as a part of employment background checks. Many employers now ask job applicants to add their social media accounts to their application, so that they can check for any content which raises a red flag. In reaction, a whole industry dedicated to ‘cleansing’ social media profiles of anything deemed problematic for a jobseeker had emerged. If this suggests that more and more social media users seek to erase anything remotely controversial or unsightly from their accounts, then this is because there is little expectation of privacy on social media in the present day. A 2023 YouGov survey found that half of 18-24 year olds “are willing to let prospective employers see their social media profiles”.

Political parties and journalists, too, made extensive use of the previously public nature of likes to see what candidates for the House of Commons were engaging with: an investigation by The Guardian into profiles of Reform UK candidates found that at least 30 subscribed to conspiracy theories that treated global warming as a ‘hoax’ or ‘scam’. The accusations against the Labour candidate Faiza Shaheen were also built on evidence gathered from her likes, which suggested she had previously liked posts downplaying antisemitism. The move by the Labour Party to remove her as a candidate was a controversial one, but one that reaffirmed that the public ‘likes’ tab on a user’s profile had come to be understood as an expression of what someone really believes, rather than what they might have clumsily or, in some cases even accidentally, liked. As far as political parties are concerned, then, the public likes tab was a legitimate source of evidence for disciplinary proceedings. Just days later, this evidence source had disappeared.

Having a social media presence is incompatible with absolute privacy

Whilst privacy online does of course matter, transparency is important too. There are already several steps that we can take to make our social media profiles more private, such as protecting posts and choosing who can see them. The debate over where the balance between privacy and traceability should lie is not new; it was also seen following the appalling racist insults directed at Marcus Rashford and others following England’s defeat in the UEFA Euro 2020 Final. Much of the abuse then appeared on, and was spread by, social media. This only confirmed the necessity of people being able to be identified online. If we take social media to be quite simply a global forum for discussion, then it is necessarily communal and shared in nature. Having a social media presence is incompatible with absolute privacy, as the whole principle on which it is based is connection and interaction with others. Liking posts is a form of participation in these interactions, not that dissimilar to commenting and reposting. It is hard to see why we should expect the former to be kept secret when the latter clearly is not.