X changes, explained
Who can see your likes on X? Only you and the author
If you are wondering where someone's Likes tab went, or whether people can see what you
liked: X made likes private in June 2024. Here is what that actually means.
By Lovlin Thakkar, who builds Muffle
·
· 2 min read
Likes used to be public. Anyone could open your profile, tap Likes, and scroll through every
post you ever hearted. Journalists used it. Exes used it. Plenty of people liked things in
public that they would not have posted themselves.
On 12 June 2024 X switched that off for everyone. Before then, hiding your likes was a
Premium perk. Now it is the default, and you cannot turn it back on.
Who can see what
| Who can see it |
|---|
| Your own likes | You |
| That you liked a post | You and the person who wrote it |
| How many likes a post has | Everyone |
| Someone else's Likes tab | Nobody. It is gone from other people's profiles |
| Who liked someone else's post | Only that post's author |
X's engineering director, Haofei Wang, put it in one line when the change was announced:
a like is visible between you and the author, the author is notified, and nobody else sees it.
Paying does not change this. Premium does not let you see anyone else's likes.
Where your own likes went
In May 2026 X added a private History tab on iPhone. It replaces the Bookmarks tab and holds
your likes, bookmarks, long videos and articles in one place. If your Likes tab seems to have
disappeared, look there.
What it changed in practice
X's reason was that people held back from liking things they worried others would see.
Hiding likes was meant to fix that.
The trade-off is the one nobody mentions: a like is now closer to a bookmark you share with
one person. The author still gets a notification with your name on it. If you want to save a
post without anyone knowing, use a bookmark. The count is public, but nobody, not even the
author, sees who saved it.
That also makes bookmarks the better place to keep things you want to find again.
Muffle's bookmark search searches the full text of
everything you have saved, and the export
guide covers getting them out of X.