Quora A2A: How can I hide my likes on Twitter? Only likes

(I am no longer answering questions on Quora's website)

My answer assumes the questioner is asking about tweets that he or she has liked, rather than tweets of theirs that others have liked - though in either case it's not possible to hide them beyond making your account public.

Liking a tweet is a semi-public act in that anyone can see that you've done it by looking at your liked tweets page, mine is here https://twitter.com/jobrodie/likes - just change the username in the URL and see yours or anyone else's (only if their account is public of course). You cannot hide any liked tweet from here beyond unliking it, which you can do by clicking once again on the heart symbol to unlike it (it's a toggling sort of arrangement: click once to like, click again to unlike).

However once you've liked a tweet Twitter will most likely have sent out a notification to the tweet's sender so it's possible (depending on their settings) that they'll have been made aware, via the notifications tab, or via pop-up notifications or by email.

Newer versions of Twitter including the latest #NewTwitter interface have also been 'surfacing' (explicitly drawing attention to) these 'like' actions in your timeline so you may see "So and so liked a tweet by XYZ". Most people find this pretty irritating and I've written a post on my tech-focused blog that addresses it called 'Hate seeing other people's likes? Some options to try' - the post has had 110,000 views since I published it, from which I assume a fair few people want to stop that feature.

Many people like a tweet to bookmark it, rather than to say 'I like what you've said' or 'I've seen this and am liking it to signal the amiable end to this exchange', or whatever meaning people ascribe to the action. There are plenty of ways to bookmark a tweet to read later and if that's all you want to do with it then do that instead of liking it and no-one needs to know.

Examples might include bookmarking the URL of the tweet (desktop) or copying and pasting its URL into some file of saved tweets, you can also email the tweet to yourself or take a screenshot. You could even create a spare account, log in there and like it then the like is not linked with your primary account. That may be taking things a bit far of course!