Who Can See Favourites in Twitter? The Direct Answer

The short version: On X (formerly Twitter), likes are public by default, which means anyone, including people you don't follow and people who don't follow you, can see what you've liked unless you've switched your account to private. There's no separate "hide my likes" toggle. The only real privacy lever you have is making your whole account protected, and even then your old public likes stay visible if the account was public when you liked them.

The actual answer, no dancing around it

People still call them "favourites" because that's what the little star used to be called before X rebranded it as the heart icon in 2015. The function is the same thing today, just renamed "Likes." And the answer to who can see them hasn't really changed in over a decade: if your account is public, your likes are public. Full stop.

That means:

• Anyone with an X account, logged in, can view your Likes tab by visiting yourusername.com/likes (it's literally that URL structure).
• People who don't even have an account can sometimes see a limited version via search engines, depending on how your profile is indexed.
• Your followers, people you follow, strangers, your boss, your ex, a journalist doing a story on you, a competitor researching your brand, all of them can see your Likes unless your account is set to private.

There is no middle ground where followers can see likes but strangers can't. It's either everyone or no one, and "no one" only happens through a protected (private) account, which also locks down your tweets, replies and follower list.

Why this trips people up so often

I think the confusion comes from the word "favourite" itself. It sounds personal, almost like a private bookmark, the kind of thing you'd keep in a notes app. But X has always treated it as a public social signal, the same way a retweet or reply is public. The platform wants likes visible because they're used to recommend content, show up in "liked by" notifications, and feed the algorithm's sense of what's popular. Privacy was never really the design intent.

Compare that to, say, saving a tweet to your Bookmarks. Bookmarks are private, only you can see them, there's no public URL for them, and nobody gets notified. That's the private equivalent people are looking for when they ask this question.

A worked example

Say you run a small consultancy and you've been liking a string of posts from a competitor's account late at night, partly out of professional curiosity, partly to keep tabs on what they're saying. You assume it's harmless because you haven't retweeted or commented, just tapped the heart.

A prospective client, doing basic due diligence before hiring you, scrolls to your Likes tab out of curiosity (people do this far more than you'd think when deciding whether to trust someone online). They see forty likes on a direct competitor's posts, including a couple of mildly combative replies you liked. It reads as odd, maybe even a bit obsessive, and it plants a small seed of doubt that has nothing to do with your actual work.

Nothing bad happened on purpose, but the exposure was entirely avoidable. That's the kind of scenario that makes this question worth asking before you build up months of liking history, not after someone screenshots it.

What to do about it

Here's the practical sequence I'd run through if privacy around your likes matters to you:

• Step 1: Decide if you need the account public at all. If this is a personal account you use to browse and you're not building a public brand on it, switching to a protected account in Settings and Privacy > Audience and Tagging is the only guaranteed fix. It hides everything, likes included, from anyone who isn't an approved follower.
• Step 2: If you need to stay public (most business accounts do), change your liking behaviour instead. Treat the heart button as a public endorsement, because that's what it functionally is. If you want to save something to read or reference later without broadcasting it, use Bookmarks instead of Likes.
• Step 3: Audit your existing Likes tab. Go to yourusername.com/likes and scroll back through the last few months. Unlike anything that would be awkward in front of a client, a journalist, or a future employer. There's no bulk-unlike button built in, so this is manual, which is annoying but worth doing once every few months.
• Step 4: Separate your accounts if you're doing both personal and brand activity. A lot of business owners keep one public brand account for marketing and a separate, protected personal account for everything else. It's a clean way to keep your professional Likes tab tidy while still having somewhere to be a normal human online.
• Step 5: Build this into your broader social media habits, not as a one-off fix. If you're managing multiple accounts or a team posts on your behalf, this is exactly the kind of thing worth covering when you pick the right social media tool for your workflow, since some scheduling and monitoring tools make it easier to review activity like likes before it piles up unnoticed.

The uncomfortable bit nobody mentions

Most articles on this topic stop at "likes are public, here's how to go private." What they don't say is that going private isn't free. A protected account on X can't be quote-tweeted, can't easily grow through discovery, and loses most of its reach for marketing purposes, because the whole point of the platform's distribution is built on public interaction. If you're using X for business, going private to hide your likes is a bit like locking your shop door to stop people seeing what's in the window, you've solved the privacy problem by removing yourself from the market. For most business accounts, the better trade-off is public account, disciplined liking habits, and heavier use of Bookmarks for anything you don't want on display. That's less satisfying advice than "just flip this switch," but it's the version that works if visibility matters to your business.

Where this fits into a bigger productivity habit

Reviewing your public footprint, likes included, is one of those small admin tasks that's easy to let slide for months. I'd treat it the same way I treat inbox zero or clearing out old drafts, a short recurring task rather than a crisis response. If you're already building routines around productivity for your business, add a quarterly ten-minute social audit to the list: check your Likes tab, check tagged photos, check old pinned tweets. It's unglamorous but it closes gaps before they become client-facing problems.

If you're managing several platforms at once, tools that centralise activity across accounts, things like NapoleonCat, can make this kind of audit faster, and it's worth reading up on how to pick the right social media tool before you commit to one.

What about other platforms while we're at it

If you're thinking about this because you're cleaning up your whole online presence, it's worth knowing that Pinterest boards and likes are similarly public by default, and Instagram likes have gone through several visibility changes over the years. If Pinterest is part of your marketing mix, there's a useful rundown of tools to grow your business on Pinterest that touches on managing what's visible there too. And if the real goal behind tidying up your social activity is generating better leads rather than just hiding old likes, it's worth spending more time on how to generate, nurture and manage your leads and prospects than on scrubbing a likes tab nobody but you is that worried about.

Frequently asked questions

Can someone see my Twitter likes if they don't follow me?

Yes. As long as your account is public, anyone on X, whether they follow you or not, can view your Likes tab by visiting your profile and clicking Likes, or going directly to yourusername.com/likes.

Is there a way to hide just my likes without going private?

No, X doesn't offer a setting to hide likes while keeping the rest of your account public. The only ways around it are to stop liking publicly sensitive content, use Bookmarks instead for private saves, or protect your whole account, which hides everything, not just likes.

Does unliking a post remove it from someone's notifications?

Unliking removes it from your public Likes tab going forward, but it doesn't erase the fact that the original poster may already have seen a notification that you liked it. The notification itself typically isn't retracted once it's been delivered.

Do private (protected) accounts hide old likes from before they went private?

Generally, once you switch to a protected account, your Likes tab becomes visible only to approved followers going forward, including historical likes made while the account was still public. However, anyone who already saw or screenshotted those likes before you went private obviously still has that information.