When "likers'' go private: Engagement with reputationally risky content on X
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Study 1 shows "Difference-in-Differences analysis of engagement with 154,122 posts by 1068 accounts before and after the policy change". All this tells us is that existing accounts did not have a noticeable change. It doesn't suggest anything about accounts created after where the culture of Twitter (appears) to have shifted quite a bit from before going private.
Basically "okay cool, existing accounts didn't change their behavior". What about new accounts? More anonymous accounts? Can we understand anything else about platform growth and interaction? What about classes of user w/ respect to verified users, anonymous accounts vs accounts tied to real identities?
Study 2 is also very limited to draw that conclusion because people are less likely to honestly report their engagement with content or beliefs that could be punishing in a given political environment. This was most astutely observed by the French polymarket user who crushed it betting on the 2024 election using neighbor-polling methodology [0]. Essentially, it appears to be more reliable to ask about the preferences of a respondent's social circle than ask the respondent directly.
[0] - https://www.cbsnews.com/news/french-whale-made-over-80-milli...
I wouldn’t be surprised if Elon decides “nvm likes are public again” with zero consideration.
Blue checkmark had no value then, has no value now.
Before it was just a "good boy" badge. It just meant that whoever distributed that thing liked you enough.
A decade ago you could quickly check the blue mark and know that the account most likely belonged to the person it was labelled for. The people who had a mark when they shoudn't have were by far the minority, and mistakes were the exception.
In 2026 a blue checkmark actually means the account is far more likely to be fake, more likely to be lying and more likely to be engagement trolling. There's no guarantee it even belongs to a human person. The platform gives the account holder money if they can convince you to click spam links!
It's not even close to having the same value now as it did then.
They routinely removed blue checkmarks of people that had naughty opinions. The account was known to belong to the actual person. This was no mistake, it was just the good boy badge being removed for vibes.
My point is not that Twitter now under its retarded billionaire king is better. It is not.
It was shit then, it is shit now. The world would be objectively a better place if Twitter had never existed.
The turd just smells different under Musk. You happened to enjoy the old smell.
This is actually you doing it again, lying-via-hyperbole. This didn't happen routinely (it was high profile enough to get news stories the few times it did) and it was pretty specifically white supremacist groups.
> You happened to enjoy the old smell.
If you approach conversation with a little more honesty yourself you might not just fall into the assumption other people are partisan.
That's what you are doing. I am pretty left-leaning myself, if you look at my post history.
Twitter was a notorious toxic dump long before Musk acquired it. Nothing in what I described was a lie.
The blue checkmark was supposed to be something that meant "account is verified, person is who they say they are". It was weaponized by the platform itself to mean "this person has no naughty opinions". Now I ask, was this an improvement?
Now it is actually more straightforward. "Blue checkmark means person gives money to Twitter on a monthly basis". It is still a toxic dump, it just smells different.
That conclusion's a surprise to me. I used to basically never like anything (even innocuous stuff) unless I specifically wanted to endorse it (essentially treating it as a less direct retweet). I like stuff all the time now.
They do note their methodology could be affected by inorganic engagement that wouldn't be affected by like visibility, though. I wonder what other factors could've led to that conclusion.
Imo it really sucks they social networking is a dark forest, controlled by a very few, who increasingly have offered less and less and less at higher and higher prices to researchers, academics, and more generally bots and services that used to be up to & doing cool things. BlueSky has the juice, imo, and while most folks using it today are only using official Bluesky services, some folks are using independent services for all their PDS hosting and for viewing the network.
That the network is public feels like such a minimum baseline level, is such a basic obvious and essential baseline for society to begin to have any trust ability or engagement with such mass communication systems as we have.
Previously, retweeting would show something to your followers, and liking tweets would...show them to your followers...
Two ways to do the exact same thing. So it was added cognitive pressure to pick which action to do.
Anecdotally, I have been 'liking' (as a verb) posts about 3x more after anonymity went into effect. I used to be anonymous on X until I started meeting people at IRL events and then had to be more cautious about what I broadcast to my network. Anonymized likes gave me back a lot of that freedom.
They catch enough fraud that their customers get a positive ROI, but surely they don’t catch all of it.
It's one level further. The global intelligence apparatus is the real customer, and they economically reward those who would build the most-surveillable and/or most-opinion-influencing products and services.
In relatively early days of Reddit, before mainstream awareness, I thought it suspicious how clever or knowledgeable so many of the comments were. Better than any other general-purpose venue I could think of.
So, when telling people about Reddit, I'd sometimes remark that I suspected they'd enlisted a bunch of writer shills, to frontload and elevate their comments traffic.
Maybe it was all genuine and organic, and an artifact of the voting system and network effects, while the bar for quality was set so low by some other venues.
Though, years after Reddit was mainstream, I heard something about the founders originally writing a lot of the comments themselves.
I feel like even though Reddit has undergone various management changes, technology changes, site UI/UX changes -- the core demographic is still there and I hope they don't fuck that up. Once old.reddit.com is gone I'll know the shark has truly jumped. Or maybe someone intelligent will get reigns and understand that domain is not to be fucked with.
The same "initial implicit filter followed by gradual but inevitable reversion to the mean" dynamic explains your observations of early reddit without implying fraud, although it certainly doesn't imply the absence of fraud either. That said, "fraud" is probably a strong word for reddit astroturf in this present day and age where we have a (comparatively) planet-sized Dead Internet built on geological quantities of ads and slop.
That seems like dubious methodology. Obviously if a celebrity posts something that's going to get more engagement than some rando, even accounting for the difference in impressions.
I think the potential reputational damages would still be on the forefront of most people's minds, knowing that at any stage, at the whim of Elon, these will be revealed.
Note that Twitter "likes" is still not private today in the sense that the original post authors can see who liked their post. I suspect people who were really sensitive to this visibility simply wouldn't engage with risky content to begin with.
Private likes are different from bookmarks in that it shows how many likes the post got, but not the number of bookmarks.