BRANDPOWER reports that Elon Musk’s online platform X has removed another heritage from its Twitter history nearly 10 months after the tech mogul changed the social media service’s name.
Musk, the controversial multi-billionaire has removed twitter.com from profiles on the site, From now on, users who type in twitter.com will be directed to “x.com,” Musk wrote on Friday.
Musk bought Twitter in October 2022 for $44 billion. He renamed it saying that was necessary to show that his platform is much more than just a short messaging service.
In addition to a new function for calls, he also wants to make X a place for job searches and money transfers.
EU Commission gives Microsoft 10 days to hand over AI documents
Following the takeover, Musk relaxed content moderation rules and slashed that department’s staff.
Advertising revenue, which historically almost exclusively financed Twitter, collapsed.
Many advertisers feared that their brand names woud appear alongside posts containing hate speech. X denies that there is a problem with hate speech on the platform
A message at the bottom of login and home pages reads: “We are letting you know that we are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same.”
The reaction to this latest step in a billionaire’s takeover and renaming of a wildly popular app with a beloved name that fit like a glove was not great. A Tweet has now become the onerous ‘a post on X (formerly Twitter)’. Wired compared today’s step to “a venomous puss moth emerging from its hard cocoon.”
The rebrand was announced last summer to, as Musk posted then, both “ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app. This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video. In the months to come, we will add comprehensive communications and the ability to conduct your entire financial world. The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird.”
It came after an enormously chaotic period for the platform that saw Musk step down as CEO and bring in former NBC Universal ad chief Linda Yaccarino to the role.
Musk has a long history with X, launching X.com, an online bank that was the basis for PayPal. He bought back the URL in 2017. His plans to add financial services to X have stalled thus far.
Courtesy: NAN/DEADLINE
