Feature
The Gist
- Privacy prioritized. Hidden likes aim to enhance user privacy and reduce unhealthy engagement.
- Engagement dilemma. Balancing mental health with user engagement poses ongoing challenges.
- Analytic evolution. Marketers must adapt to less visible metrics, shifting focus to deeper analytics.
Another day. Another controversial move by X, formerly known as Twitter. The engineering team at X announced last month that post likes will be hidden by removing the like tab.
X received the usual media attention for its feature changes, continuing a trend of criticized updates since Elon Musk took control of the platform. The latest announcement highlights a long-standing dilemma among social media platforms: how to handle user behavior related to like counts.
The “hidden like” protocol aims to protect user privacy. This is the latest in a series of social media moderation measurement changes as platforms face increasing demands for better mental health moderation.
But is X’s action enough to push back against its critics? Let’s take a look at how this social media moderation tactic will impact marketing strategies.
Social Media Moderation: How Hidden Likes on X Works
The hidden like format eliminates the like tab. The like count and other metrics for one's posts now appear under the Notifications section. This way, a post's author can still see who liked a given post, but followers and other users cannot see the tally. If you visit another person's profile, you will no longer see who liked their posts.
Haofei Wang, a director of engineering for X, explained that people felt discouraged from liking posts containing “edgy content.” He noted that public likes are incentivizing wrong behavior.
Wired reported that Elon Musk also endorsed the idea of removing likes, believing their importance had diminished.
Rethinking Social Media Metrics on X — and Other Platforms
Musk has a significant point in supporting the social media moderation decision. His endorsement is the latest in a series of industry thoughts on the role engagement metrics play in marketing social media strategies. What does a like tell you about a person’s intention to buy? For instance, did they like a snarky Wendy’s post because they enjoy the brand's personality, or because it reminded them to buy a Baconator sandwich, indicating a potential purchase?
There is no straightforward answer. In either case, marketers often consider the volume of post reactions as a validation of the post’s message and reach.
Unfortunately, users have learned to focus excessively on a single “like” count, which is unhelpful. Likes are vanity metrics, and these have been deemphasized for a while. I predicted this trend earlier in a post on 2023 social media trends.
Over the past several years, social media platforms have experimented with adjusting engagement counts to prevent users from becoming overly obsessed with these metrics as validation for their posts, profiles or messages. A meme might receive 10,000 likes, but a post from a business selling fraudulent services or counterfeit products can harm the community.
Each platform has different adjustment methodologies, sometimes for different reasons. In 2015, I reported how Facebook was considering an empathy or dislike button, but Facebook ultimately backed away from this idea.
In 2022, I wrote about the mental health issues on social media, noting YouTube’s decision to remove dislike counts from its platform. YouTube found that some users would repeatedly hit the dislike button as a form of harassment against a user’s profile.
Today, the key social media platforms offer varying levels of count visibility. TikTok users can decide who views a video's likes. Instagram allows individual post likes to be hidden. Facebook also has a “hide” setting for its likes.
While X garnered attention for its hidden-like decision, the platform is not introducing a radically innovative social media moderation feature. X is aligning with a quiet trend among social media platforms — figuring out how to help manage concerns about user engagement and mental health.
Related Article: Why 'X'? What Lessons Does Twitter Rebranding Hold for Marketers?
Fighting Misinformation and Mental Health
A driver for the deemphasis has been the rising criticisms of misinformation and mental health issues among social media users. Social media platforms are trying to demonstrate their capabilities to encourage responsible engagement behavior while moderating the negative impressions that “like/dislike” counts can create.
Some experts are concerned that X's decision is not enough to discourage bad behavior. People can still repost articles or share posts, creating a shadow environment of shared posts and responses that can scale across the platform.
Moreover, no research study indicates that removing likes yields a direct mental health benefit on social media. The key problem is that the intention behind a click on any internet media — a webpage, a landing page, or a YouTube video — is unclear. This ambiguity raises anxiety, which is at the heart of Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy’s call for Congress to label apps and issue legislation outlining social media usage for teenagers and children.
Likes: A Marketing Analytics Challenge
The hidden intention behind a like is a major analytics challenge. Examining a dashboard result shows that something on a page was clicked, but not the precise reasons why the click occurred. For years, analytics professionals have interpreted intention by comparing metrics related to a given website or app. Social media metrics can be correlated to another activity, but the steps can be overly complex or impossible to attribute a clear consumer message.
Misidentifying online behavior has become common, with debates often misjudging an individual’s intentions. For example, the Hindustan Times reported on a school principal in Mumbai, India, who was fired after an article alleged she liked X posts that supported Pro-Israel, Pro-Hamas and anti-Modi views. This type of incident also occurred in 2018 when Twitter was still Twitter — a Marriott employee was fired for liking a pro-Chinese tweet.
The social media moderation like-removal decision compounds an earlier move to allow consensually produced and distributed adult content on the platform, provided it is "properly labeled and not prominently displayed." Adult content has always been spammy in nature, and, worse, it sometimes contains videos from sex trafficking sources. Some users employ altered word spellings to circumvent platform restrictions. X’s decision regarding adult content will not eliminate the spam techniques that often spread such material online.
As a result of these concerns, X users have expressed disapproval about the like removal. Many have stated it will be harder to distinguish bots and shored-up behavior from bad actors.
The “edgy content” mentioned in Wang’s X post is seen as a reference to the new permission for adult-oriented postings. By allowing this edgy content to appear in streams, X is effectively doubling down on its content moderation issues.
Related Article: Exclusive Data: Twitter Is Shrinking Under Elon Musk
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What Marketers Should Expect for Measurement Planning
Marketers should expect to apply variations of predictive analytics. The choices for measuring engagement through analytics have expanded. Affinity reports, a panel-style analytic reporting method, have waned in popularity as analysts seek more real-time measurement. More precise statistical modeling of data is now widely available. Sentiment analysis involves exporting data into real-time programming to create statistical sentiment models around the text.
X will have to figure out how to allow users to make these exports privately if they want influencers and brands to understand customer sentiment around a particular word or phrase used in a post.
With each new change, X has lost some influence among tech enthusiasts, leading many X users to feel that their considerations were overlooked. However, many groups still use X, so it will take time to determine if hidden likes will be an effective social media moderation tactic on the platform, which remains under significant industry scrutiny.
