Elon Musk has a history of floating edgy ideas for X and not implementing them or, at the least, slow-walking them. Nearly a year ago, Musk said he planned to eliminate the ability to block users, a development that would’ve rendered the site formerly known as Twitter into even more of a hellscape. He hasn’t actually done it, and if he ever does, there’s no guarantee the change will stick.
But Musk’s latest plan to axe one of the site’s most famous features has been set in motion: Soon, likes of posts will be anonymous to all but the person who sent the post and the person who pressed the like button. Musk and his engineers say that the update is a matter of encouraging free expression. “Important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!” Musk argues. His director of engineering says, “Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be ‘edgy’ in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image.”
That rationale is, obviously, silly. Musk portrays concealing the identity of tweet-likers as a way to let people adhere to their convictions. It really isn’t, though; it instead allows people to indicate approval of a post (and add to that post’s stats) without having to personally stand up for anything. It comes across as a move by Musk to cater to thin-skinned users who can’t handle social blowback for indicating a belief. Never mind that if they’re not comfortable airing that belief, they could simply not press the like button.
But what’s really happening is more nefarious than Musk anonymizing a key feature of the platform to protect some posters’ feelings. The much likelier driver of the change is the embarrassing morass of spam, bots, and platform manipulation filling the void on Musk’s X. And by hiding information about who likes a post, Musk has made it easier to obscure his mess.
On social media, a like serves two functions. One is to inform the platform about what we like or what riles us up so that the company running the platform can serve us the right kind of slop to keep us at the trough and sell us to advertisers. The other is to provide a passive vehicle for expressing appreciation or approval. In that way, likes are a major tool of online community building, like a digital nod of the head or a pat on the back. Some people use likes as bookmarks, but Twitter added distinct bookmarks in 2018.
Nearly every platform honors the like’s social utility. If I want to see each of the 3,812,516 accounts that liked Kylie Jenner’s most recent Instagram posts, I can do that. If I want to see every person who liked my buddy Bob’s job announcement on LinkedIn, I can do that. If I want to see who liked the latest NBA highlight on ESPN’s TikTok, I can do that. This ability isn’t universal; Instagram can hide who likes a user’s posts, but only if the poster enables the feature. Reddit’s upvotes are private even to the person who has created the post being upvoted. But anonymity is baked all the way into Reddit’s culture; very few posters even use their real names there. Critically, the site has guardrails in place to prevent (albeit not always successfully) people from using anonymity to ruin others’ experiences. Every subreddit has its own moderators, who might crack down harshly when someone behaves antisocially.
Guess which social media giant absolutely does not have the infrastructure or desire to prevent antisocial behavior? Musk slashed Twitter’s content moderation staff to the bone when he took over in the fall of 2022. In a way, it was a victory for him, as his mass layoffs and chasing-off of employees saved Twitter millions of dollars. And despite frequent outages and bugs in Musk’s early days in charge, the platform is still standing. Press “post,” and your text will appear on the internet instantly. The site might even be sort of making money even as its valuation has apparently plunged since Musk took the company private.
But as a matter of user experience, Musk has allowed X to deteriorate horribly. The most noticeable problem is spam. Automated accounts shilling crypto hustles or DIY pornography weren’t a part of many users’ everyday experience before Musk arrived. These days, they’re practically inescapable in the replies to many users’ posts and are firing off direct messages with reckless abandon.
An adjacent problem is the advertising. Blue chip advertisers began to flee the moment Musk came aboard. Some have returned, but X’s owner often finds fresh ways to push them away. Late in 2023, both Musk’s personal antisemitic remarks and those he allowed to appear next to ad content caused more companies to hightail it off the platform. X appears to have fewer frequent users now than before Musk’s reign, so the advertisers still on the site are preaching to a smaller congregation.
These failures dovetail with one another in a way that had to make it appealing to shield the identities of accounts that like posts. A lot of the ads currently featured on X are straightforwardly terrible.
Before Disney yanked advertising from the platform, you might have run across an ad for a new Marvel movie. At this point, you have a better chance of being served an ad for a weirdly named crypto product you’ve never heard of in your life. You are less likely to engage with that than Deadpool, and the return on investment for X’s partners is likely to decline. But what if you didn’t need to engage? What if accounts of questionable origin, ones without regular people behind them, could backfill that engagement? That’s a bit easier to pull off when the general public can’t see who’s behind the accounts juicing the numbers.
The same incentive exists for all sorts of hackery. Foreign governments (even American allies, it turns out) have used X to run inauthentic influence campaigns against members of Congress. Disguising those actions is easier when most people have no concept of who’s really engaging with posts. Any motivated politician or pundit with a point to make will similarly now have an easier time creating an impression that an inflated number of people on the internet support their ideas. Twitter likes were never a great form of resistance, but with their public visibility, they were their own sort of barrier against bad behavior.
Musk has every reason to lower that barrier. Yet the main argument against trusting him is that perhaps his most frequent area of dishonesty since buying Twitter has been platform manipulation. When Musk first struck his deal for Twitter in the spring of 2022, he cited “defeating the spam bots” as a motivator. When he tried to back out of the deal, he paradoxically argued that it was because there were too many inauthentic accounts, the exact thing he’d said he wanted to defeat when he made the deal. When he put blue verification badges up for sale, he pitched it as a way to ensure users’ authenticity. That too was ridiculous, as the new verification system has made Twitter an impossible place to get reliable information. Hiding who likes a post is just one more step in making it more difficult to sift through the garbage.
