Why is "like" as in Facebook likes often put between quotes?

I often see people use the noun with quotes:

We have received a lot of "likes."

rather than:

We have received a lot of likes.

Why is this done?

Solution 1:

Usually I see that in cases to divorce the action of clicking Like on facebook from meaning a person truly likes the topic at hand.

Consider a posting of a tragedy. Many people may click Like, not to imply they enjoy the tragedy, but to raise attention to the situation.

In other cases it might be the author just isn't familiar enough with the platform to identify it as a first class object as to say "We have received a lot of things that are known as likes".

Solution 2:

Facebook’s peculiar usage of the word like, especially as a noun, is new enough that more conservative users of the language regard it as so nonstandard or even unclean as to warrant scare quotes. Scare quotes are the typographical equivalent of the fireplace tongs that one might employ to transfer a dead bird (seen as both ritually and parasitologically unclean) from one’s yard to the trashcan. See earlier question on scare quotes.

Solution 3:

Quotes are one way to distinguish between Facebook-Like and English like, which are never the same thing, even if they may sometimes happen at the same time. That is, to "Like" something on Facebook is to click a button labelled "Like", which is not what the word "like" means in English, even if the suggestion is that you would click that button when you do like something. (Often people also don't like things they "Like", for various other reasons people click the button, such as incentives or instructions to "click Like if you agree that you hate police brutality", etc.)

This is one of the sneaky things that happens when a company uses a natural language word to mean some activity or product of theirs, rather than the usual meaning of that word. If you don't somehow indicate whether you mean you liked something, or you clicked the Like button, it's not clear what you meant. Companies tend to like and encourage this sloppy thinking, because it starts to have people think of their company even when people don't mean that.

For example: Jennifer says, "I saw a cat picture I liked today." Bob hears her and might wonder if she meant Facebook, because of the frequently-heard association of the verb "liked", even though Jennifer never mentioned Facebook.