Elon Musk Set to Change How News Links Appear on X
New Delhi: X (formerly Twitter) is set to change how news links appear on the social media platform despite opposition from advertisers, Fortune reported. The links will now appear without a headline and any other text with only the article’s lead image on display, the report said.
The move is reportedly spearheaded by Elon Musk himself who confirmed the upcoming change in a tweet. “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics (sic),” he wrote.
This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 22, 2023
The change means that anyone sharing a link on the platform would need to manually add their own text alongside the links they share on the platform; otherwise the tweet will display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL, the report said.
According to Fortune, clicking on the image will still lead the user to the article or website but the move is bound to affect advertisers as well as publishers who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites.
“It’s something Elon wants. They were running it by advertisers, who didn’t like it, but it’s happening,” a source familiar with the matter told Fortune, adding that Musk thinks articles occupy excessive space on the timeline.
News links on the platform are currently accompanied by several elements: an image, a short headline, and a brief description of the article.
According to the Guardian, the move may be an attempt to drive people to sign up for X’s premium service. With the shortened links, users could be inclined to include more text along with their posts. The premium service allows a single post of up to 25,000 characters.
However, the call for longer posts contradicts Musk’s attempts to reduce the amount of space tweets take.
The tech-mogul has made a series of arbitrary changes since he bought the platform in October 2022 including banning journalists from the platform, increasing the character limit, paid verification badges and reinstating banned users like Donald Trump, among others.
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