Can people see what you like on X (Twitter)?

X announced the change from its engineering account on 11 June 2024: "This week we're making Likes private for everyone to better protect your privacy." The next day it posted: "Starting today, Likes are private for everyone." Since then, this is who sees what.

Like counts stay public. X's API documentation lists likes among the metrics "Visible to anyone", and no X help page describes a way to hide a post's like count.

Usually. X's glossary defines a like this way: "Tap the heart icon to like a post and the author will see that you appreciate it." Your like shows in their Notifications timeline, where X says they can "see which of your posts have been liked", unless their notification filters hide it. Before the change, Haofei Wang, X's director of engineering, summed it up, as quoted by NPR: "Like is visible between you and the author, the author will be notified, but not anyone else."

Unliking doesn't come with a promise. X's help page says how to undo a like, "Click or tap the liked icon", and nothing about whether the author's notification goes away. Assume they may have seen it.

To save a post without telling anyone, bookmark it. X's help page says bookmarks "are private and are only viewable to you within your X account", and X shows only how many people bookmarked a post, never who.

Haofei Wang confirmed the plan on 21 May 2024: "Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior. For example, many people feel discouraged from liking content that might be 'edgy' in fear of retaliation from trolls, or to protect their public image."

He gave X's other reason in the same post: "the more posts you like, the better your For you algorithm will become." X's announcement on 12 June said it too: "Liking more posts will make your For you timeline better."

Public likes had cost people. Late on 11 September 2017, Senator Ted Cruz's account liked a pornographic video. It was unliked, but not before people took screenshots, and Cruz blamed a staffer: "It was a staffing issue, and it was inadvertent." In April 2023, The Philadelphia Inquirer reported that the president of Thomas Jefferson University, Mark Tykocinski, had liked tweets that questioned the science of COVID-19 vaccines, called gender reassignment surgery 'child mutilation' or were critical of diversity offices. He told the paper he liked tweets to bookmark them, and that he regretted "my lack of understanding of how 'liking' a tweet is an implied endorsement." He stepped down in July 2023, less than three months later; the university gave his research as the reason.

X's privacy policy took five months to catch up. The version in force in 2024 listed "Your interactions with X content of other users, such as likes, and people you follow" among what X shares with other users. Since the version effective 15 November 2024, it says "such as replies" instead.

Its help pages haven't caught up. As of October 2026, none of them says likes are private. "How to like a Post" still carries a note, there since at least 2017, that your likes of a protected account's posts won't show in your Likes tab "unless the viewer is a follower of the post's author": a rule from when others could open your Likes tab. X's page on how its ads work still says that if you like content, "your followers may see your name associated with that content".

Bookmarks were private from the start. When Twitter launched them in February 2018, TechCrunch explained why people wanted them: a like alerted the author, and your list of favorites was "accessible to everyone from your Twitter profile".

UnfollowMonkey doesn't store your likes, and never likes anything from your account: is an unfollow tracker safe to connect?