When he’s not sending fellow rich people to space or facilitating porn addictions, Elon Musk is busy making changes to X/Twitter that no one asked for.
X users awoke to news on Wednesday that the platform will now hide the likes feature, in an effort “to better protect your privacy,” according to a post from X’s engineering team.
The change went into immediate effect, and means users can no longer see what tweets other users have liked. It puts an end to the likes tab that was once viewable on other people’s X profiles; a feature which had famously landed many notable people in hot water.
Thankfully for all those aspiring to one day be Twitter famous, like counts and other metrics will still be visible under posts, but now only the author can see who liked it. X engineers said making likes private will result in a more customised twitter feed (read, porn-filled).
All of this is techno-babble which basically means you can like whatever you like (ha!) without those likes being visible to anyone else (was that more confusing?).
In what is surely not a coincidence, the private likes feature comes hot on the heels of X’s recent policy update around adult content. Earlier this month, the platform permitted adult pornographic content so long as it is “labelled and not prominently displayed.”
And now, you’re free to like all that content without being snooped on, ya filthy animals! The death of the likes tab has already seen many users, now free from peering eyes, enact an irrepressible liking-spree; something that caused a tizzy for celebrities on pre-Elon Twitter.
In 2022, Samuel L. Jackson was caught liking multiple X-rated pictures on Twitter, but it was on his birthday so cut the man some slack! The Pulp Fiction star swiftly unliked the raunchy posts after legions of fans alerted him to his eye-popping like-spree.
For his part, US Texas senator Ted Cruz was asked to explain himself in 2017 after his official Twitter account also liked a racy post. The gaffe was later blamed on someone in Cruz’s staff who “inadvertently hit the like button,” an excuse that almost allowed Cruz to save face given he once tried to banish sex toys.
Harry Styles was likewise caught red-handed (and probably cramp-handed) in 2014, and while I won’t explain the post in detail, it prompted the hashtag #HarryDontLickAnything, so you can do the maths.
They aren’t the only ones. Over the years, Chance The Rapper, Jeremy Clarkson, and Christopher Biggins have all suffered a similar fate at the hands of, you guessed it, NSFW posts (are men ok?).
Even Musk himself, according to this post, had a likes tab peppered with suggestive posts, perhaps explaining why he made them private in the first place.
Make of it what you will that all of these posts are porn related (humanity is depraved), but at least they don’t have to worry about anyone catching them out.
Image Source: Steve Granitz/FilmMagic, Dave J Hogan/Getty Images and Emma McIntyre/Getty Images
The post Elon Musk Nuked Twitter Likes, So Let’s Revisit Every Celeb Who Was Sprung Faving A NSFW Tweet appeared first on PEDESTRIAN.TV .
