The Like button replaced Twitter’s star-shaped Favorite button in 2015.
Twitter introduced Favorites in its early years as a way for users to mark posts they enjoyed or wanted to save. The feature used a star icon, but Twitter found that the star could mean different things to different people. In November 2015, the company changed the control to a heart and renamed the action “Like.”
Twitter said the heart was more familiar across languages and services, and early testing reportedly showed that users liked it more than the star. The change also aligned Twitter more closely with other social platforms that used a like-style interaction to express approval or appreciation.
The terminology can be confusing because older posts, help pages, and third-party tools may still refer to Favorites. The underlying idea remained similar: users could signal a positive reaction and view posts they had liked. After Twitter’s 2023 rebrand to X, the platform continued using the Like concept, although its interface and terminology changed in some versions.