[Answer]-Django link multiple tables

You have two options:

Use M2M field in the Article model:

class Article(models.Model):
    ...
    liked_by = models.ManyToManyField(User)

Or create the intermediate table by yourself (which is the second snippet in our question):

class LikeArticleUser(models.Model):
    article = models.ForeignKey(Article)
    user = models.ForeignKey(User)

SQL representation for both options will be the same so which option you choose is a matter of taste.