How To See Likes On X When The Tab Is Gone From Everyone Else's Profile

For most of Twitter's life, your likes were a public exhibit. Anyone could open your profile, tap Likes, and scroll back through years of things you tapped at two in the morning. Journalists did it. Exes did it.

In June 2024, X (formerly Twitter) switched that off for everybody. The Likes tab stopped rendering on other people's profiles, and tapping the like count under a stranger's post stopped opening a list of names. X described the goal as letting people like posts without worrying about who was watching.

Your own likes were not deleted. Only the audience changed, which is why so many people search "where are my likes on x" when nothing is missing. They see a profile page with no Likes tab and conclude the feature is dead. The list is still yours to read, visible to you and to nobody else, and as of 2026 that holds on every tier.

A few taps, and none of them are in Settings.

Tap your profile picture in the top-left corner to open the side menu, then tap Profile. Under your bio and follower counts sits a horizontal row of tabs: on a free account Posts, Replies, Media, Likes, with extra tabs on paid tiers. Go by the label, not the position. Swipe the row left if Likes is cut off the edge. Tap it.

If that row has no Likes tab at all, your app has the newer layout, where likes were folded into History. Open the side menu again and tap History, the entry that used to read Bookmarks. It opens on four sub-tabs: Bookmarks, Likes, Videos, Articles. Tap Likes. X began this rollout on iOS in mid-May 2026 and moved to other platforms in stages, so two devices signed into the same account can disagree for weeks.

What loads is your like history in reverse chronological order. Infinite scroll with no jump-to-date control and no search field inside it, so finding something you liked in 2021 means thumb work. Expect gaps. If the author has since deleted the post or blocked you, the entry either vanishes or renders as an empty box. A deactivated account does the same.

One tab gets mistaken for Likes often enough to name. Highlights holds posts you wrote and added there yourself; nothing you liked lands in it. It also belongs to the paid tier, so a free profile may carry no Highlights tab at all. If you are checking Twitter likes and the results look like your own writing, you are on the wrong tab.

Sign in at x.com, click Profile in the left-hand column, then Likes in the same tab row. Or type the address directly: x.com/yourhandle/likes. If your account has already been moved to the History layout on the web, the tab is gone from that row and the list sits under History in the left-hand column instead.

That URL is worth knowing while the tab is still there: fastest route, and it makes the privacy rule legible. Swap in someone else's handle and you land on their profile with no Likes tab at all, the same answer the app gives, delivered faster.

The browser has one advantage here, narrower than it sounds. Find-on-page searches the likes currently drawn on screen. The catch: X draws the timeline as a virtualised list, so posts you scrolled well past are dropped from the page. Find-on-page reaches only the window still rendered around you. For anything older, use the archive below.

The 2024 change cut the audience for like lists down to one person: the author. You can still see who liked yours.

Two routes, and one is better. Notifications logs each like as it arrives; as of 2026 its tabs read All, Mentions and, on larger accounts, Priority. None of them isolates likes, so on a busy account you scroll past replies and follows to find them. Settings has a quality filter and muting rules, which suppress noise rather than pull likes out. The cleaner route is per-post: open one of your own posts and tap the engagement figures beneath it, where likes, reposts and quotes are broken out by account.

For everyone else's posts, that door is shut. The number is still printed under the post for anyone to read; the names behind it are not. If you want the full picture of who can still see what, the breakdown of your likes' audience since 2024 goes through it case by case.

Scrolling fails for anything older than a few months. There is a better tool.

Go to Settings and privacy, then Your account, then Download an archive of your data. X asks for your password and sends a verification code, then queues the request. It is not instant; X says it can take up to 24 hours to prepare, and long-lived accounts wait longer.

Inside the zip is a file named like.js holding your liked posts as structured data, each entry carrying the post text and a link back to it. Open it in any text editor and use find, or drop it into a spreadsheet. It is the only way to search your likes rather than scroll them.

The known gap: entries record which posts you liked, not when. If you need the date you tapped the heart, the archive will not tell you. On Facebook, the route to a full likes history runs through Activity Log instead.

Two buckets, and the confusion goes.

Private now: the Likes tab on your profile as others see it, and the list of accounts under any post you did not write. Still public: the like count itself, printed under every post and readable by anyone who can see the post. That qualifier does work, because since the 2023 lockdown X has kept a login wall in front of profiles, timelines and search, though a direct link to a single post often still renders for a logged-out visitor. Reposts and quotes were not part of the June 2024 change and still show their sources.

So the counter is the surviving public signal. If moving that number is the goal rather than digging through your own history, that is a separate job, and our page on likes for X posts covers it. Nothing there touches who can open a likes list; that list is no longer open to anyone. Whether the count deserves it is another question, since X has been quietly favouring replies over likes.

X publishes no weights and no account of how likes feed into what appears in anyone's timeline, so treat confident claims about it as guesswork. What is observable is narrower and more useful: a like sends a notification, it adds one to a public counter, and it files the post into a list only you can open. Where that leaves the balance between likes and conversations is a judgment call, and whether comments matter more than likes on X is worth reading first.

One thing the privacy change never touched. The author still gets the notification, instantly, with your handle on it. Your likes are hidden from the crowd, never from the person you liked.

X made likes private for all accounts in June 2024, removing the Likes tab from other people's profiles and closing the list of accounts that appears under a post. The like count stayed public. Only the names behind it were hidden, and only the author of a post can still see who liked it.

No, not since June 2024. Nobody can open your Likes tab except you, and that holds whether they are logged in, following you, or paying for a subscription tier. The one exception is per-post rather than per-profile: when you like someone's post, the author of that post gets a notification with your handle and can see you in their own engagement list.

Only on posts you wrote. Open your own post and tap the engagement figures underneath it to see the accounts behind each number, and the like notification carries the handle as well. On anybody else's post, tapping the like count no longer opens a list of names for you, whatever tier either account is on. That has held since June 2024.