Can You Make Your X Likes Public? No—But There's Some Workarounds

Lockbag

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posted on 1 month ago — updated on 1 second ago

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In June 2024, X (Twitter) made the likes of all users private, and there is no way to make them public again. Despite this, X users have figured out a couple of workarounds to this problem. In this article, we'll go over everything you need to know about making public likes on X, including workarounds for having public likes again, and the reasons behind the change.

Can You Make Your X Likes Public?

Can you make likes public on X?

No, there's no official way to make likes public on X. As of June 2024, all likes on X (formerly Twitter) are private. You can see your own likes, but they won't be displayed on your profile, and you can't see other people's likes. Despite this, there are a few workarounds—which we cover later in this article—to view others' likes or make your own likes public.

Workarounds to View Likes

OldTwitter plugin The OldTwitter browser plugin reverts X back to the 2015 Twitter layout, with an option to switch to the 2018 layout instead. While this won't make your likes public globally, you will be able to see the likes of other users. Chrome, Edge, Opera, Brave, and other Chromium browser users can install OldTwitter directly from the Chrome Web Store. Firefox users must download the plugin from the OldTwitter GitHub and install it manually. To ensure the plugin isn't removed when you close out of Firefox, download and install the Firefox Developer Edition browser and follow these steps: Download the latest OldTwitter release from the GitHub Releases page. Make sure you select the OldTwitterFirefox.zip file to download, as the Chrome file won't work in Firefox. Open Firefox Developer Edition and go to about:config. Change xpinstall.signatures.required to false. Go to about:addons. Click Install Add-on From File. Choose the OldTwitterFirefox.zip file you downloaded and add it to Firefox.

Replies After likes became private, many users started replying to posts indicating that they liked them. While this isn't a 100% perfect workaround, it lets you publicly show your support for a post—and gives the original post more engagement.

Why were likes made private?

According to X, likes were made private in the interest of the site's users. The chief interest that X seems to be protecting is the privacy of its users, according to the Engineering on X account. Private likes were previously only available to X Premium subscribers. Haofei Wang, the director of engineering at X, stated that "public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior." Wang said that public likes discourage users from liking edgier content because they're afraid of retaliation, trolls, or tarnishing their public image. Despite this, many X users were unhappy that likes became private. In response to X CEO Elon Musk's post about increased likes analytics following the switch, some users pointed out that many of these likes were from bots liking pornographic material or users farming for engagement.