Are we ‘like’ done here? X’s move to hide likes is the latest sign of their declining power as social media currency

Anushka Kulkarni is doubly upset with X. In the last week of May, the platform announced that users would no longer be able to see who has liked someone else’s post or view the “Likes” tab on other users’ profiles. “My friends saw the ‘Likes’ tab as a way to subtly background-check guys they were interested in,” says the 23-year-old social media marketing professional. She saw her additional disappointment reflected in a post the morning after the announcement, calling it a sad day for someone curating likes for their imaginary admirer. “In reality, many of us were curating likes for an imaginary voyeur,” says Kulkarni.

As a result, she now finds herself liking fewer tweets, that too mostly of people in her social circle to express support and solidarity. The platform justifies the move by saying it was to allow people to freely like edgy content. However, Kulkarni asks, “What if most of these likes are from bots? What if people are using likes as bookmarks because they are private now?” There is no way to check this anymore. The authenticity and charm of a like on X is gone, she says.

In 2009-10, Facebook introduced the “Like” button as a small thumbs-up symbol to indicate positive affirmation. In the next decade and a half, every other social media platform went about commodifying people’s innate need to be liked. Thus, a simple thumbs-up icon became the most significant motif of social media interactions. Its influence was so powerful that in 2015, Twitter renamed its “Favourites” as “Likes”. It also serves as the starting point for the catchphrase “Like-ShareSubscribe”, which is ubiquitous in YouTube’s creator community.

Like’s Labours Lost:

Over the past four-five years though, big tech companies have been tweaking the way users interact with likes. In October 2019, Instagram removed the “Following” tab that showed a user what the people they followed on the app had liked on the platform. By May 2021, the Meta-owned company introduced an option for users to hide the “Like” count on their posts, too. Then in November 2021, YouTube decided to make the “Dislike” count on videos private, accessible only to the channel owner and the platform. Up until launching a Reel-like Spotlight feature in November 2020, Snapchat was known as the social app with no public count of likes. Over the past year and a half, Instagram has been encouraging users to share content, publicly noting that highly shared content receives increased visibility. In December 2023, the app (quietly) made the share-count of posts publicly visible.

So, have likes lost their mojo?

The short answer is, no. For content creators, metrics like shares and comments are crucial for engagement. However, for the average user, likes remain the primary gauge of their online presence, says Divya Geryani, a 29-year-old counselling psychologist from Jaipur, based on her own experience and that of her clients. Likes are seen as a clear affirmation, unlike shares, which can involve negative discussions in private groups. “Some users hide the like-count of a post if it fetches fewer likes than usual,” she adds.

So if platforms are nudging users to view and engage with likes differently, it must be for their benefit and not a move in the public interest, argues Geryani. On X, the move to hide who is liking what might prioritise traffic over quality, she suggests, while on Instagram, asking people to share more could be a way to get them to spend more time on the app counts on videos after an experiment in July 2021. In a blog statement later that year, YouTube stated, “We found that viewers were less likely to target a video’s dislike button to drive up the count. In short, our experiment data showed a reduction in dislike-attacking behaviour.”

Interestingly, “YouTube Rewind 2018”, a recap of the year that went by on the platform, happens to be the single most disliked video on the Google-owned videosharing site, receiving over 15 million dislikes since its upload in December that year.

In the case of Instagram, the platform tested removing ‘Like’ in 2019. Two years later, it announced it was making hiding the like count optional. “Removing likes doesn’t seem to meaningfully depressurise Instagram, for young people or anyone else, and so likes will remain publicly viewable by default,” the company announced in 2021. The Verge called the move “anticlimactic”. As per a New York Times article from October 2021, “Researchers discovered that when the Like button was hidden, users interacted less with posts and ads. At the same time, it did not alleviate teenagers’ social anxiety and young users did not share more photos, as the company thought they might, leading to a mixed bag of results.”

Hiding like counts may not have worked as expected for Aneetta Joby when she started on Instagram. Joby, 27, is a product marketing manager from Bengaluru. “People are more likely to like a post when they see others have liked it too. It motivates them,” she says. When like counts are hidden, she believes people are showing genuine appreciation for the content, independent of its popularity, and training the algorithm accordingly. However, Joby thinks hiding the liker’s identity, as X has done, might be more effective. “A few months ago, someone messaged me saying they enjoy my posts but don’t like them publicly to avoid upsetting their partner. Maybe that will change now,” she says, amused by the interaction.

From a privacy standpoint, hiding likers’ identities on X is a positive move, says Kalim Ahmed, a digital investigator formerly with Alt News. “It could prevent incidents like a Mumbai school principal being fired after she was targeted by certain sites for liking pro-Palestine tweets,” he says. Ahmed says a purported theory behind Elon Musk’s decision to hide likes on X is to falsify engagement metrics which cannot be quickly verified. Another is to protect public figures, including Musk, who faced backlash for their liked content, such as pornographic or transphobic tweets.

This may have created a new issue, though: an increase in pornographic content on user feeds, as X’s algorithm shows what people you follow like, without revealing their identity. “I’m seeing more explicit content on my feed,” says Kaavyya Kesarwani, a 25-year-old startup community manager from Bengaluru. “The other day I almost tweeted, ‘Guys, we know you’re openly liking porn on Twitter now, but please tone it down—it’s ruining my feed,’” she says, exasperated.

Kesarwani observes that, in the past, her controversial tweets received more bookmarks than likes, indicating that people resonated with them but were perhaps hesitant to publicly show support. “I’m curious to see if this changes now,” she says. While content posters can still see who liked their posts, bookmarkers are the ones who remain truly anonymous, untouched by the vagaries of likes.