- Iconic actor has taken action against X/Twitter’s latest feature
- Latest change came in on June 12 but has sparked controversy
- Hashtag quickly went viral on X with people protesting against the move
The force is strong in this one: Mark Hamill, who played Luke Skywalker in the Star Wars series, is now taking on X (which everyone still calls Twitter) over its latest feature, sending a hashtag viral.
Secret likes
Hamill’s beef stems from a change that X made on June 12, which means that users can still see who liked their posts, but others cannot. Likewise, users cannot see who has liked other posts. Like count for users’ own posts still show up under notifications. The move, according to X Engineering (@XEng), is to better protect users’ privacy. This post had 67,000 likes. Elon Musk, who owns Twitter, retweeted this post, although it is not known if he had any influence on the decision to implement this change.
The actor, who has 5.1 million followers on X, was one of many users to take to the platform to express their anger at the move. He fought back by commenting ‘like’ under hundreds of posts and starting the hashtag #bringbackLIKES, which quickly went viral.
What’s the point?
Other users quickly added their opinion. One summed up the feeling of many by saying: “What’s the point of Likes if they are private?”
Another said: “I want people to know what I like, Elon.”
One more cynical poster replying to the @XEng post said: “in order words… since we can’t get rid of blatant platform manipulation we are going to hide it.”
Meanwhile, a user on Instagram wasn’t so supportive of Hamill. “Wow and that’s going to make Musk make changes? Very ambitious of him” followed by a crying laughing emoji.
