Elon Musk says he’s considering scrapping ‘likes’ and reposts on X posts

Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that his social media company X is considering getting rid of likes and repost figures on posts.

He made the comment to attendees of the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference.

If he carries on with this move, X  would simply stop showing the number of likes and reposts that a post has received, though the creator of the post would still see it on their end. 

Musk also told the crowd that X is a few months away from receiving approval for a money transmitter license in New York.

Engagement metrics like ‘likes’ and ‘reposts’ – formerly ‘retweets’ – have been a contentious issue for Musk since he bought the company.

Last year, he allegedly pushed engineers at the company to tweak the algorithm and boost his posts, pushing them onto users’ timelines.

When Musk bought Twitter in 2022, he claimed that under his ownership, the site, renamed X, would be an ‘everything app,’ including not just messaging but also banking and shopping.

In February of 2023, after Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet received more engagement than Musk’s, the CEO reportedly deleted the ‘flopped’ tweet and told his engineering team he would fire them if they didn’t fix the issue.

In July, in a bid to woo back advertising revenue, Musk announced plans to cut ad rates on the platform by 50 percent. 

In August, a new update was quietly added to the platform’s privacy policy says that X now has permission to harvest its users’ fingerprints, retinal scans, voice and face recognition and keystroke patterns.

The billionaire announced that he intended to remove users’ ability to ‘block’ other users across every aspect of the social media site, excluding private ‘direct messages.’ 

His comments yielded an outpouring of concern from the site’s users, including many subscribers to its $8-per-month ‘Twitter Blue,’ now ‘X Premium,’ services, who compared ‘block’ to ‘self-defense’ and their rights under the 2nd Amendment. 

That particular change however never materialized.