- Musk also told an audience that X will soon have a money transmitter license
- X owner said he would remove ‘block’ feature but the change never happened
- READ MORE: X can now harvest ‘biometric’ information including fingerprints
Elon Musk announced on Wednesday that his social media company X is considering getting rid of likes and repost figures on posts.
He made the comment to attendees of the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference.
The move, his latest since buying the company in 2022, would simply stop showing the number of likes and reposts that a post has received, though the feature would still stand.
Musk also told the crowd that X is a few months away from receiving approval for a money transmitter license in New York.
Elon Musk bought social media site Twitter in 2022, and since then he has announced several major changes to the site. Some have happened, others have not
When Musk bought Twitter, he claimed that under his ownership, the site, renamed X, would be an ‘everything app,’ including not just messaging but also banking and shopping.
Engagement metrics like ‘likes’ and ‘reposts’ – formerly ‘retweets’ – have been a contentious issue for Musk since he bought the company.
Last year, he allegedly pushed engineers at the company to tweak the algorithm and boost his posts, pushing them onto users’ timelines.
In February of 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 issue.
In June, Musk was accused of flouting free speech for reneging on a deal to air a Daily Wire-funded film over claims it ‘misgenders’ trans people – claims the CEO later shot down by calling the decision a ‘mistake’ made by his staffers.
In July, in a bid to woo back advertising revenue, Musk announced plans to cut ad rates on the platform by 50 percent.
In August, a new update was quietly added to the platform’s privacy policy says that X now has permission to harvest its users’ fingerprints, retinal scans, voice and face recognition and keystroke patterns.
the billionaire, then CEO, announced that he intended to remove users’ ability to ‘block’ other users across every aspect of the social media site, excluding private ‘direct messages.’
His comments yielded an outpouring of concern from the site’s users, including many subscribers to its $8-per-month ‘Twitter Blue,’ now ‘X Premium,’ services, who compared ‘block’ to ‘self-defense’ and their rights under the 2nd Amendment.
That particular change never materialized.
