How to Hide Likes on X: What You Can Still Control

In June 2024, X switched likes to private across the whole platform. The Likes tab disappeared from other people's profiles. Open any account today, in September 2026, and Likes is not among whatever tabs that profile shows. Which tabs appear varies by account and app build. None of them opens a route through X's own apps or website into what that person has liked.

Your own tab survived. It sits on your profile, holds everything you have ever tapped the heart on, and loads for you alone. X framed the change as letting people like things without worrying how the list would look to everyone else. That pressure starts with why people tap like in the first place.

What did not change is the number. Every post still shows how many likes it has, to anyone who can open the post.

Hiding your likes used to be a paid feature. Before the platform-wide change, the option to hide your Likes tab was available to X Premium subscribers and not to anyone else. Tech press covered its arrival in September 2023, though X never documented the switch cleanly on its own help pages. Once every account's likes went private by default, that switch had nothing left to do.

If you go hunting anyway, the route is Settings and privacy, then Privacy and safety, then the section covering your posts and your audience. X reshuffles these menus between app versions, so the wording on your screen may not match mine. What you will not find is a likes control, because there is nothing left there to control.

This is where people arriving from other platforms get stuck. Facebook still ships list-level privacy of the kind X removed. On X the decision was made centrally, for every account at once. Searches for how to hide likes on Twitter and how to make Twitter likes private still run at volume, and both names are correct, but the answer to both is the same.

Private does not mean anonymous. When you like a post, the author gets a notification with your handle in it, and can open the liker list on their own post to read your name there. That behaviour survived the 2024 change and still holds in September 2026.

The working rule is simple. A like is invisible to the audience and loud to the person you liked. If your worry is one specific person knowing you read their post, the heart is the loudest thing you can do short of replying.

On the phone, tap your avatar, open your profile, choose Likes, and unlike straight from that list. On the web it is the same tab on your own profile page. The count on the original post drops by one as soon as you do it.

What unliking cannot reach is a push notification already delivered to a phone. That one has landed. Whether the in-app entry then vanishes from the author's notifications is not behaviour X documents, so treat it as unknown, not a rule. What you can verify is the liker list on the post, where your name comes off.

There is no bulk unlike button. X has never shipped one, and the third-party tools offering it work by taking access to your account, through an app authorisation or your password outright. Heavy trade for tidying a tab nobody else can see. If you want to know what is actually in there, Settings and privacy, then Your account, then Download an archive of your data will hand you the full like history as a file. On the web you re-enter your password to request it; in the app X sends a verification code to your email or phone instead. X's own guidance says it may take up to 24 hours for the archive to be ready, and X emails you a link when it is.

If you have been using the heart as a save button and the pile it built is what sent you looking for a hide switch, the feature you wanted is one icon away. The bookmark icon sits in the same row under a post as reply and repost, your Bookmarks list opens from the side navigation on the web, sometimes tucked under More, and from the profile menu in the app (newer builds call that entry History), and no other account can load it.

One caveat. As of September 2026, X shows a bookmark count on posts, so an author can see how many people saved something, though no names attach to that number. If you want a private record of things to find again, this is the version of liking that leaves nothing on your profile.

The other reading of the question points the opposite way: stopping other people from liking what you post. X has no per-post switch for that. You can limit who is allowed to reply, when composing and afterwards, but that control governs replies only and leaves likes untouched.

The instruments that do work are account-level and blunt. Blocking an account stops it liking, replying to or reposting you. As of September 2026 that is narrower than the word sounds: since the block change of late 2024, a blocked account can still read your public posts. It just cannot engage. Protecting your posts, in Privacy and safety, restricts them to approved followers, which narrows who can like them, at the cost of changing how your whole account behaves in search and in reposts. People overestimate how much any privacy switch conceals, and who can still see what on X is the list worth checking.

Instagram has a setting that hides like counts. X does not, as of September 2026. The number under your post is public, it is the first signal a reader gets about whether anyone else found the post worth anything, and nothing in the app turns it off.

The list of names was the part X judged socially costly, and it is gone. The number was the part carrying social proof, and it stayed, which is why attention has moved onto it: sharper posting, better timing, and for accounts that want a post to clear its first hours with something already on the board, services that add likes to an X post exist for that reason and no other. Whether the number deserves that attention is less clear than it looks, given how X now treats replies against likes.

One last practical point. The June 2024 change was not retroactive to anything already captured. Screenshots taken while the Likes tab was public are still screenshots, and whatever third parties archived during those years stays archived. The privacy applies from the change forward, which makes the only meaningful housekeeping the kind you do yourself, one unlike at a time.

They already are. X made likes private for every account in June 2024, and there is no switch to flip because the change was applied platform-wide rather than offered as an option. Your Likes tab loads only for you. The two exceptions are permanent: the like count on a post stays public, and the author of any post you like can see your handle in their own liker list and in their notifications.

Not through X's apps or website. The Likes tab is gone from other people's profiles, and opening a post shows you its like count without a viewable list of who supplied it, unless the post is yours. Authors keep that view for their own posts. Anything you may have seen on a stranger's Likes tab before June 2024 was visible under the old rules, which no longer apply.

Because X removed public likes in June 2024 and the change stuck. The stated reasoning was that a publicly readable Likes tab made people cautious about what they were willing to like, since every tap was appended to a list anyone could scroll. Whether that goal was met is not something X publishes numbers on. The mechanical result is plain enough: counts remain public, identities do not.