Today In ‘Here’s How Elon Is Making ExTwitter Worse,’ He’s Going To Get Rid Of Headlines & Snippets For News
Look, I know some folks get annoyed that I write as much about Elon Musk and exTwitter as I do, but he's really been the most fascinating case study in sheer wrongness regarding the running of a modern internet company and it's just endlessly fascinating. And, really, if he just stopped doing stupid things, I could get to the very long list of other stuff I'd like to write about, but day after day after day, he just comes out with something new and stupid.
It's uncanny.
Anyway, the latest, as first reported by Kylie Robison at Fortune, is that Elon wants to remove headlines and snippets from news articles posted to exTwitter. When an Elon stan tweeted about Robison's article, Musk confirmed it and said it was coming from him directly" and it will be done to greatly improve esthetics." From Robison's article:
The change means that anyone sharing a link on X-from individual users to publishers-would need to manually add their own text alongside the links they share on the service; otherwise the tweet will display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL. While clicking on the image will still lead to the full article on the publisher's website, the change could have major implications for publishers who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites as well as for advertisers.
According to a source with knowledge of the matter, the change is being pushed directly by X owner Elon Musk. The primary objective appears to be to reduce the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on screen. Musk also believes the change will help curb clickbait, the source said.
It's something Elon wants. They were running it by advertisers, who didn't like it, but it's happening," the source said, adding that Musk thinks articles occupy excessive space on the timeline.
On exTwitter people were passing around images of the change, going from the first screenshot on the left (how this currently works) to the example on the right, showing a giant image that will link to the article entirely without context.
How are people even going to know to click on those images when they just look like regular images? This is truly ridiculous.
Musk also claimed that journalists should publish directly on exTwitter rather than elsewhere, suggesting he thinks he can take on platforms like Substack:
Of course, a few years back, Twitter bought a Substack competitor called Revue, but Elon shut that down because nothing good from the old company can survive. Elon has to reinvent it in the dumbest way possible.
On top of that, Musk has obviously had his battles with media organizations. We covered his stupid battle with NPR that caused the organization to leave Twitter, even once Musk rescinded his petty changes to NPR's account. And, of course, just recently there were the reports of how he was slowing down access to certain news sites. So perhaps this is just another attack on the media.
That said, there's one other possibility that I haven't seen anyone discuss. Just a few weeks ago, AFP sued exTwitter for failing to pay them under France's extremely dumb snippet tax law. This is a French law that is similar in many ways to Australia's and Canada's link tax, except it's more explicitly about snippets rather than links.
Of course, as we pointed out at the time, exTwitter should win that lawsuit, as the only way that snippets show up on Twitter is if the media org set up their Twitter Cards to work that way. The Twitter cards feature is how news sites would tell Twitter what to show when links are included, but this new change sounds like Musk will be massively limiting what data can be included through those cards.
So, it seems entirely possible that once Elon learned France was trying to make him pay for the snippets that show up via Twitter Cards, he just told the team to get rid of the snippets to get out of paying.
Of course, the reality is that this just (yet again) makes the product way worse, especially for news, which is a major reason that people use the platform. As with the remove block' idea, pretty much everyone seems to be telling Elon this is a dumb idea, but those seem to be the decisions he revels in the most.