- Musk also told an audience that X will soon have a money transmitting license
- X owner said he would remove the ‘block’ feature, but the change never happened
- READ MORE: X can now collect ‘biometric’ information, including fingerprints
Elon Musk announced Wednesday that his social media company X is considering getting rid of likes and reposting numbers on posts.
He made this comment to participants at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference.
The move, his last since acquiring the company in 2022, would simply stop displaying the number of likes and reposts a post has received, although the post’s creator would still see it on their end.
Musk also told the crowd that X is a few months away from being approved for a money transmitter license in New York.
Elon Musk bought the social media site Twitter in 2022 and since then he has announced several major changes to the site. Some happened, some didn’t
When Musk bought Twitter, he claimed that the site, renamed
Engagement metrics such as “likes” and “reposts” – formerly “retweets” – have been a controversial topic for Musk since he bought the company.
Last year, he allegedly pushed engineers at the company to adjust the algorithm and boost his posts, causing them to appear on users’ timelines.
In February 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 problem.
In June, Musk was accused of flouting freedom of expression for reneging on a deal to air a Daily Wire-funded film claiming it would “misgender” transgender people – claims that the CEO later shot down calling the decision a ‘mistake’ by his staffers.
In an effort to reduce ad revenue, Musk announced plans in July to cut ad rates on the platform by 50 percent.
In August, a new update was quietly added to the platform’s privacy policy, stating that X now has permission to collect its users’ fingerprints, retinal scans, voice and facial recognition, and keystroke patterns.
The billionaire announced that he planned to remove users’ ability to “block” other users in every aspect of the social media site, with the exception of private “direct messages.”
His comments sparked an outpouring of concern from the site’s users, including many subscribers to the $8-a-month “Twitter Blue,” now “X Premium” services, who compared “blocking” to “self-defense” and their rights under the 2nd Amendment.
That specific change never materialized.