Why is Elon Musk taking away our ability to snoop on our exes?

I’ve never really been clear about what the purpose of a Twitter/X “like” is, from the perspective of the “liker”. If I actually like a tweet enough to share it with my friends, I’ll retweet it. If it’s especially good, maybe I’ll screenshot it. A “like” is just so non-committal, like a pity laugh, or replying “yeah man, that’s crazy” to a story you were only half listening to.

One thing “likes” are especially good for, though, is getting an insight into the preferences and predilections of friends, coworkers and celebrities. Sure, Jim from accounting probably won’t post about any of their embarrassing hobbies on their main feed, but click on his profile’s “like” tab and suddenly it’s Naruto fan-art all the way down.

Want to get a sense of what type of person your crush really is? Snoop on their “likes” and prepare to be mystified by their extremely eclectic mix of political views. Hold on, why is she “hearting” both Infowars and Daily Show clips?

How about your ex? You get the sense that maybe you guys could get back together if you really worked on... wow, she is liking a lot of shirtless guys’ pics. When did she start following @ChrisHemsworthDaily? Maybe you should hit the gym.

Unfortunately, for the enterprising Twitter stalkers among us, all that will be coming to an end, soon. Company owner and perpetual fountain of good ideas Elon Musk has confirmed that user likes will no longer be viewable by default, tweeting that it is “Important to allow people to like posts without getting attacked for doing so!” The change is expected to be rolled out over the next few weeks.

It’s a mystery to me why Elon Musk, a man who regularly interacts with far right and other incredibly problematic accounts, would be in favour of hiding a person’s likes. Company director of engineering Haofei Wang said the change was coming in order to help users of the site “protect their public image”. It means that soon you’ll be able to like all the neo-Nazi content you want without fear of your employer or girlfriend finding out.

If you’re wondering why people can’t just avoid liking embarrassing and harmful content on their own, that’s a good question. Unfortunately, we’re hard-wired to enjoy clicking little buttons while we scroll, even if it comes at the expense of our jobs and loved ones (it’s basically the only thing keeping Reddit in business at this point).

How else do you explain the time when United States senator Ted Cruz’s Twitter/X account “liked” a pornographic tweet on the 16^th anniversary of the September 11 attacks? The one-time presidential hopeful attributed the errant click, which liked a raunchy video posted by an account called “@SexuallPosts” [sic], to one of his aides, which has done nothing to prevent him from being known as “the 9/11 porn tweet guy” for the past seven years.

Or how about millionaire media mogul Paul Marshall, who came under fire for liking homophobic and Islamophobic content on his account earlier this year, including including one which stated that that the prophet Muhammad was “one of the worst men ever to live”, and another that praised Hungary’s Viktor Orbán as a “true leader” for his anti-migrant and anti-LGBT+ rhetoric? Marshall did not deny his pattern of liking and retweeting, but called it a “small and unrepresentative” sample of his posts which does not reflect his views. If his likes were private, we might never have known that the owner of GBNews was engaging in the proliferation of hate speech – could you imagine?

It’s not just those on the right who will benefit from their newfound privacy, though. Just a few days ago Faiza Shaheen quit the Labour Party after being blocked from standing as a candidate in Chingford and Woodford Green, due to social media posts she had liked which criticised Israel and its actions in Gaza – a decision which you crush’s joint-favourite political talking head Jon Stewart called “the dumbest thing the UK has done since electing Boris Johnson”.

Luckily, users will still be able to see who has liked their own posts. The site is a shell of its former self, but nothing beats when a tweet of yours goes viral and you get a notification that a celebrity liked it (Mark Hamill liked a tweet of mine once, and knowing that Luke Skywalker is aware of my existence, however peripherally, is often the only thing that gets me through the day). It also means that you can still bait your crush into liking your thirst-traps, which really is the only reason some people use Twitter/X any more.

On the whole, though, this latest move represents another poorly thought-out change to a disintegrating website that worked perfectly well before Musk got his hands on it. The man spent $44 billion to take a functional piece of communication infrastructure and kill it with a thousand tiny, glitchy cuts. Personally, I feel like there were better ways to spend that money – but Twitter accounts whose posts are apparently too embarrassing to engage with publicly keep telling me he’s a genius, so what do I know?

Maybe we’ll get lucky, and Threads or Bluesky will finally take off. But until then, we’ll keep muddling along with Twitter/X – and we’ll like it.