[synthpop]

Aside from this clearly being a reactionary decision from Elon to prevent getting roasted with screenshots every time he likes nazi tweets, this also appears like a convenient way to obscure the fact that certain tweets with a large number of likes are being artificially juiced by bot accounts. Just another day on X, the best place for fake news, ragebait, and forced memes. It's honestly impressive how he's managed to fumble the platform this bad.

[hifromwork]

>this also appears like a convenient way to obscure the fact that certain tweets with a large number of likes are being artificially juiced by bot accounts

I'm not sure. You will (AFAIU) still able to check who liked a particular tweet, so you can check suspicious tweets for bot activity. But you won't be able to pivot and check which tweets were liked by a (suspected) bot account.

It's bad day for transparency, but this is not completely unlike other platforms (for example: I can't check the list of google docs you have access to, but I can check a list of people who have access to the google doc I have opened)

[NLPaep]

The article is clear: This is hiding which posts you’ve liked from other users.

Not the like counts in posts.

[synthpop]

I wasn't suggesting the like count would be hidden, but the ability to click into the like count underneath the post to see the list of users that liked the tweet. The article isn't entirely clear on if this feature would be disabled once user likes get privated, but I don't see why they would make the effort to do this in the first place if one could still see the users that liked an 'edgy' tweet anyway.