section_path: Interactions/Liking
section_name: Liking
paragraph_text: Liking
  
  Tweets can be liked by users, adding them to a list that other users used to be able to view, prior to likes becoming private for all users. The feature was available when Twitter launched in 2006. Until 2015, 'likes' were called 'favorites' (or 'favs'). The service renamed them because people "often misunderstood" the feature, and people reacted more positively in user tests. Users had the option of hiding their likes from the public, though their like would not be hidden from the list of users who likes a given tweet. Jack Dorsey said in 2019 that, if he had to create Twitter over again, he would deemphasize the like, or not include it altogether because it did not positively contribute to healthy conversations.
  
  Likes used to be public and they are not broadcast to the user's tweets timeline. When likes were public, users would often forget their likes were public or liked more revealing tweets. High-profile users and politicians' accounts have liked pornographic, hateful, and racist tweets. For instance, in 2017, Ted Cruz 's account liked a tweet with a two-minute porn video about a day after it was posted. Cruz said that many people had access to his account and one of his staff members pressed the like button in "an honest mistake".
  
  Likes would later be privatized for all users profiles, with Elon Musk stating "Public likes are incentivizing the wrong behavior", and encouraging users to like more Tweets without fear of being noticed. Likes are now anonymous, except to the author of the tweet, and to the person who liked it. Verified users could choose to private their likes prior to the update.
  
  When not logged in, users' tweets are sorted by how many likes they received, opposed to reverse-chronological.