When "likers'' go private: Engagement with reputationally risky content on X

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...

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.

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.