General Elon Musk Fukkery Thread
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X Removes Headlines From News Articles In Latest Major Update
The change comes after Elon Musk ramped up criticism of the “legacy” media.
www.forbes.com
X Removes Headlines From News Articles In Latest Major Update
Antonio Pequeño IVForbes Staff
I cover breaking news.
TOPLINE
X, formerly known as Twitter, is removing article headlines for links shared to the platform, which will now just display a thumbnail image accompanied by a website link—one of several changes to the app this year that arrives just days after Musk touted X as an alternative to popular news outlets.
Musk has made several changes to the Twitter platform since acquiring the company last year, ... [+]
ANADOLU AGENCY VIA GETTY IMAGES
KEY FACTS
The change began taking place on X’s mobile app Wednesday but has seemingly not been implemented on the web/desktop version of the platform as of Wednesday evening.Journalists on the platform complained the change would decrease attention to links and make it hard for users to understand the content of posted links, noting headlines will need to be manually written by users sharing news posts moving forward.
The change comes not long after a string of posts from X owner Elon Musk that stated the billionaire doesn’t read content from traditional news outlets he called “legacy media propaganda,” saying X was a “better,” more trustworthy alternative.
Musk argued Tuesday that links on X don’t get as much attention as they used to because the platform’s algorithm “tries to optimize time spent on X.”
KEY BACKGROUND
Plans for the headline change were first reported in August, when Musk confirmed it in a post saying it came directly from him and would “greatly improve the esthetics.” Musk and his team at X have made several changes to the platform this year. In August, the ability to block other users was removed on X, stopping users from being able to restrict accounts from contacting them, following them or seeing their posts. X also established a paid Blue subscription model in April, a shift that restricts the use of X-Pro, formerly known as Tweetdeck, to premium subscribers. Musk has made clear he intends to make X an “everything app,” integrating features into it that would make it more than a social media platform.TANGENT
X recently updated its privacy policy to inform users their biometric data would be collected in addition to their job and education history. The platform also plans to collect user data for training machine learning and AI models.
Twitter Is at Death's Door, One Year After Elon Musk's Takeover
Since the tech tyc00n took over the platform last October, he’s done everything he can to run it into the ground
www.rollingstone.com
COMMENTARY
Twitter Is at Death’s Door, One Year After Elon Musk’s Takeover
Since the tech tyc00n took over the platform last October, he's done everything he can to run it into the groundBY MILES KLEE
Elon Musk after a meeting in the office of then-House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) in Washington, DC, on Sept. 13, 2023. STEFANI REYNOLDS/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
ON OCT. 26, 2022, Elon Musk enjoyed his first and last good day as the head of Twitter (now X). Following a $44 billion acquisition he tried to scuttle but was legally forced into closing, he attempted a bit of prop comedy — entering the company’s headquarters with a porcelain sink while flashing a mischievous smile. It was all the setup to a groaner of a pun announcing his arrival: “Let that sink in!” he declared in the video caption of his entrance. It was a master class in cringe.
Nearly a year later, you’d be hard pressed to name a single improvement to the site under Musk’s direction. His biggest ideas have all blown up in his face: An $8 monthly subscription fee for a blue check that verified users then needed the option of hiding to avoid mockery. The abandonment of a valuable brand name and logo in favor of the meaningless “X,” which prompted a trademark lawsuit and led to the installation of a garish metal X structure on the roof of Twitter’s office — city inspectors had it removed just days later. Musk’s latest move is to have headlines stripped from article links, leaving only an image and media source, which he seems to believe looks better and will keep users scrolling. But for those who follow news on the app, it makes X that much more pointless.
Of course, these mistakes pale in comparison to the rancid vibes Musk has cultivated by reinstating right-wing extremists and peddlers of misinformation previously banned from the platform, amplifying their conspiracy theories, and ensuring their garbage posts are shoved into “For You” feeds by Twitter’s algorithms. He buys into white supremacist propaganda, panders to anti-LGBTQ hate accounts, and, with advertisers fleeing these intolerable conditions, found a way to blame the catastrophic loss of revenue on a Jewish civil rights group that combats antisemitism.
How much longer can this wreckage of a formerly semi-functional website stay afloat? Although it has shed millions of daily active users since Musk started tinkering with it, the endgame is more likely to come down to money. Seven banks led by Morgan Stanley hold some $13 billion in debt after backing Musk’s blockbuster deal last year, and the company itself is presumably worth much less at this point — even according to his own math. If X can’t keep making its $300 million quarterly interest payments, the financial firms may repossess it in order to recoup a fraction of their losses.
These days, when you mention Musk’s countless blunders in running X, you get a standard retort from his defenders. It doesn’t matter if you’re taking stock of his mounting desperation (like when he begged Taylor Swift to release music on the platform), or a technical fail that reveals an infrastructure coming apart at the seams (such as a frozen livestream at the U.S.-Mexico border, where he’d put on his cowboy hat to grandstand as an anti-immigration ideologue, a glitch that prompted him to send an email reading “Please fix this” to all employees). The reply is always more or less the same: If Twitter is really dying, why are you still posting on it?
It’s a fair question, even if it dodges the issue of Musk’s rank incompetence. I suppose a mixture of spite and morbid curiosity goes a long way toward keeping a person like me around. On the other hand, it’s not my first time having an online community hollowed out by a hostile force, and there’s something to be said for making the most of the end with your remaining friends — sharing gallows humor and a sense of humanity as the situation continues to devolve.
And one almost has to admire the scale of the spectacle: Musk spending the GDP of a small country to buy a flashy toy, only to make it crash and burn like a Tesla on Autopliot. There’s a sick thrill in watching him announce a tweak that will never come to pass — eliminating the “block” feature, for instance — and then get into a fight with @Catturd2 over it. He’s laid off thousands, and isn’t above personally firing an engineer who dares to correct him, yet believes X can still be transformed into the “everything app,” integrating payment and shopping services. That stuff is likely to be indefinitely delayed, much as SpaceX‘s long-promised missions to Mars. Who could fail to be entertained by such a saga of self-destruction?
Musk is not without his salesmanship, which, combined with unconditional, breathless hype from supporters, has kept alive the notion of his entrepreneurial and innovative genius. He and this audience are both expending more energy each day on flat denials of grim headlines and vague assurances that X is actually “thriving” like never before. Sooner or later, that magical thinking will run ashore on reality, and until then, yes, the site will survive — but in a state of waking demise, with a user base divided between those cannibalizing what’s left and the stunned spectators.
That can hardly be mistaken for a healthy, habitable public forum, let alone an asset that could one day turn a profit. It offers the illusion of life, however, in arguments, abuse, recriminations, and disgust. The paradox of what used to be Twitter is that it is now sustained by little except the mutual contempt of hardened combatants fighting for an inch of territory. Nobody wants to cede the ground.
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US ad revenue at Musk's X declined each month since takeover -data
Monthly U.S. ad revenue at social media platform X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter in October 2022, according to third-party data provided to Reuters.
www.reuters.com
US ad revenue at Musk's X declined each month since takeover -data
By Sheila DangOctober 4, 20234:39 PM EDT
Updated 11 hours ago
[1/2]Elon Musk, Chief Executive Officer of SpaceX and Tesla and owner of Twitter, gestures as he attends the Viva Technology conference dedicated to innovation and startups at the Porte de Versailles exhibition centre in Paris, France, June 16, 2023. REUTERS/Gonzalo Fuentes/File Photo Acquire Licensing Rights
Oct 4 (Reuters) - Monthly U.S. ad revenue at social media platform X has declined at least 55% year-over-year each month since billionaire Elon Musk bought the company formerly known as Twitter in October 2022, according to third-party data provided to Reuters.
The company has struggled to retain some advertisers since the takeover, as brands have been wary of rapid changes under Musk's ownership. X's chief executive, Linda Yaccarino, is expected to meet on Thursday with bank lenders who helped finance Musk's acquisition to outline the company's business plans, according to a person familiar with the plans.
U.S. ad revenue dropped by 78% in December 2022 compared with the same month the previous year, the steepest monthly decline since the acquisition, according to ad analytics firm Guideline, which tracks advertising spending data from major ad agencies.
Ad revenue in August, the latest data available from Guideline, declined 60% year-over-year. X declined to comment on the data.
Reuters Graphics
Musk has previously acknowledged that the platform has taken a hit on revenue and has blamed activists for pressuring advertisers. Last month, he accused the Anti-Defamation League of being the primary cause behind a 60% decline in U.S. ad revenue, though he did not provide a time frame.
In a statement on Wednesday, the ADL said any allegation that it caused losses to X were false. The organization added it was prepared to begin advertising itself on the platform "to bring our important message on fighting hate to X and its users."
During an interview at Vox Media's Code conference last week, Yaccarino said 1,500 brands had returned to the platform in the previous 12 weeks, and that 90% of the top 100 advertisers were back on X. She added that X could turn a profit by early next year.
Musk rebranded Twitter as X in July as part of his plan to transform the company into an "everything app" and offer a variety of services in addition to social networking, similar to apps like WeChat in China.
This includes building peer-to-peer payment features and increasing the amount of video content on the platform, Reuters previously reported.
Reporting by Sheila Dang in Austin, Texas, and Yuvraj Malik in Bengaluru Editing by Matthew Lewis
Keith Edwards (@keithedwards) on Threads
X has officially removed headlines from website links. It now just displays an image and the website. What will it take for the media to abandon it?
www.threads.net
"What will it take for the media to abandon it?"
For Threads to get a chronological feed and free discussion of politics. Migration from political media alone would've drug every other media over and made it the default. Nobody would still be talking about LLon's car crash jamboree
For Threads to get a chronological feed and free discussion of politics. Migration from political media alone would've drug every other media over and made it the default. Nobody would still be talking about LLon's car crash jamboree
all of this happened b/c people who believe a vaccine turns you into pedophile zombies and that "feeble dementia patient" Joe Biden orchestrated the greatest election fraud in history wanted to "protect" their misinterpretation of the first amendment, and the richest loser on earth wanted so badly to be liked, he decided to bypass lefgitimately helping society by making a fake and grossly overvalued bid to buy the platform so the very same people would click the heart on his, "you're telling me a shrimp fried this rice" b*stardized joke tweets.
Anthony Dean (@dtgeek@mastodon.social)
That makes Twitter way less useful (if possible). Unless one types in text with the headline, or articles switch to header images with the headline just to accommodate this...
mastodon.social
choc_cardigan
Squad
This makes spreading disinformation easier
Anthony Dean (@dtgeek@mastodon.social)
That makes Twitter way less useful (if possible). Unless one types in text with the headline, or articles switch to header images with the headline just to accommodate this...