“Now even if you accidentally like a pornographic image, it won’t cause an uproar.”
Previously, it was possible to see who liked which post, but after the change, only the person who posted the post can see who liked it, and third parties cannot know. There are pros and cons to this specification.
Those opposed to X lament that the system that allowed users to see what they “liked” was a good thing about X. For example, by finding people who “liked” posts that you had “liked,” you could become friends with people who shared your tastes, but that is no longer possible.
View all images
Also, by knowing what people “like” you can learn more about their character than you can get from their posts alone. This was also important in finding people who shared the same sensibilities as you.
And an unexpected use case is to check if someone is alive. Just because someone logs in to X doesn’t mean they’ll post every time. There may be people who haven’t posted anything in a month or two, or even a year.
It would be worrying if someone you were close to suddenly became like that, but by seeing the “Likes” section constantly being updated, you could secretly “check that they were still alive.”
On the other hand, there are also voices in favor of making “Likes” private. The change in specifications was originally billed as being for the purpose of “protecting privacy,” and this is exactly what has been praised.
Until now, if you “liked” an ideological or political post, people with opposing views would find out and you could be attacked.
Celebrities in particular cannot casually press “like” on such posts, and even if they do so accidentally, there are cases where the image is screenshotted and posted online, resulting in endless attacks from those opposed.
The same can be said not only for ideological posts, but also for hobby posts.
Until now, X has had the risk of revealing one’s hobbies and tastes with just one “Like” button. In response to this change, Ryuji, a cooking researcher, posted, “Is it finally going to be a specification that doesn’t reveal likes? Now even if I accidentally like an erotic image, I won’t get in trouble.”