Twitter axed: What you need to know about X, formerly Twitter
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After massive layoffs and major content policy changes, the social media platform in late July was renamed X.
PHOTO: AFP
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SINGAPORE - Much has happened to Twitter since billionaire Elon Musk’s US$44 billion (S$62 billion) blockbuster takeover of the company in October 2022.
After massive layoffs and major content policy changes, the social media platform in late July was renamed X.
Not only was a big name in the social media world erased, its iconic Twitter blue bird was also extinguished to make way for a stylised version of the letter “X”.
“Tweets”, which had become part of the English language, is now simply referred to as “posts”.
The social media platform was delisted from the stock market and half its roughly 7,500 employees were laid off in dramatic fashion. Its Singapore office, which served as Twitter’s Asia-Pacific headquarters, was shut in January, with the remaining local staff instructed to work remotely. It is not known how many workers in Singapore were laid off.
The Straits Times looks at the past year since Mr Musk’s tumultuous takeover.
Why was Twitter rebranded X?
Mr Musk’s rebranding of Twitter to X is one step in the quest to create an “everything app” like China’s WeChat, which integrates multiple digital services into a single app to provide social media content, news, messaging, ride-hailing, shopping and payment.
Along with the new name, X will also change terms associated with Twitter. “Retweets”, for instance, is now called “reposts”.
On its app and website, users are greeted with the platform’s new logo – a large “X” - although the platform’s URL remains as “twitter.com” for now.
The chief executive of electric carmaker Tesla has long been enamoured of creating a company called X. He started X.com in 1999, an online bank that later merged with the electronic payments service PayPal. Nearly two decades later, he bought the X.com website back from PayPal, laying the groundwork for the upcoming project for an everything app. (At the moment, when a user types “x.com” on a web browser, the URL automatically switches to twitter.com.)
X’s new chief executive Linda Yaccarino said in July: “X is the future state of unlimited interactivity – centred in audio, video, messaging, payments/banking – creating a global marketplace for ideas, goods, services, and opportunities.”
What other changes have been made since the takeover?
The new name and logo are the most visible changes that Mr Musk has made to the platform.
Others have been a little less obvious. He also changed some of the platform’s features, including paid badges that were meant to verify users, amid concerns of impersonation on social media platforms.
X’s news feed – the stream of posts that people see on their app’s home page – was also modified, displaying posts from the accounts a user followed and an algorithmically curated “for you” feed, mimicking TikTok.
The new feed pulls in posts from content creators the users might be keen to follow and, in February, also floods users’ feeds with posts from Mr Musk.
The platform’s head of trust and safety Ella Irwin has said that it will lean heavily on automation to moderate content on the site, amid a reported surge in hate speech on the platform.
Posts were also given additional labels, including metrics such as how many times a post has been viewed.
Other labels had described prominent news organisations as “government-funded” or “state-affiliated media”, but the platform has since removed them following criticism from affected organisations that the titles were misleading.
Mr Musk also reinstated former US president Donald Trump’s account on the platform after running a poll asking his followers if he should do so. Mr Trump was booted from Twitter
Mr Musk’s overhaul behind the scenes has often caught the public’s attention too. Immediately after taking over the company, he fired the company’s top executives, such as then-CEO Parag Agrawal.
Most notably, Twitter laid off roughly 3,700 employees,
Employees waited nervously to find out their fate through e-mail. These included an unknown number of laid-off employees from Singapore,
Hundreds more employees globally soon resigned. Those who remained were said to have been warned by Mr Musk in internal communications to be ready for long working hours, seven days a week.
The Twitter layoffs sparked a series of global staff purging among tech companies from end 2022 to early 2023, including Meta, Amazon and Google, which laid off tens of thousands of employees altogether.
Following the retrenchments, the company is facing multiple lawsuits, including a proposed class action filed in San Francisco that accuses it of illegally laying off contract workers without notice.
In June, Mr Musk announced that he would step down as Twitter’s CEO and handed over the reins to Ms Yaccarino ,
X’s chief executive Linda Yaccarino said the platform plans to focus on content creation and commerce partnerships.
PHOTO: AFP
Who is using the platform now?
X remains one of the largest social media platforms – its base is believed to comprise between 300 and 400 million users.
But the platform has seen an exodus of users who have left, citing the post-takeover turmoil as a key reason for leaving. Celebrities Elton John, Whoopi Goldberg, Jim Carrey and Gigi Hadid are among big names who have abandoned the platform since the takeover.
Ms Hadid announced she left the platform after seeing reports that it had axed its human rights department. She said: “For a long time, especially with its new leadership, it’s becoming more and more of a cesspool of hate and bigotry, and it’s not a place I want to be a part of.”
Advertisers too, have cut off ties with X, including Balenciaga, which is said to have deleted its profile in November. Others, like General Motors, United Airlines and Volkswagen cut spending on the platform.
Mr Musk said in July that the platform has lost roughly half its advertising revenue since the takeover.
What are the alternatives to X now?
Social media alternatives new and old emerged as users grew wary of Twitter during Mr Musk’s takeover – there are many reports of the platform experiencing an uptick in bugs, hate speech and policies that have alienated its original user base.
Threads, which was launched by Meta in July to challenge X ,
The new platform also allows users to seamlessly install and kickstart their Threads account via the Instagram app, helping Threads to draw a record 100 million sign-ups in under five days.
But the long-term appeal of Threads is currently uncertain – the average time people spend on Threads daily has dropped more than 75 per cent three weeks after its July 6 debut, according to market analysis firm Sensor Tower.
In July, TikTok also announced its own tweet-like text-only format,
Another X-like app, Mastodon, looked to be a worthy alternative when more than a million users signed up to the platform after Mr Musk’s Twitter deal. Mastodon had at least 10 million users as at March.
Unlike X, Mastodon, which is named after the extinct mammoth, is decentralised. Its users are spread across community-controlled groups, called servers, much like Reddit. Each server works like a mini-community that users select based on their interests, and data is not accessible by the service provider like it is on Facebook or X.
Mastodon has struggled to find its footing despite the interest during the Twitter takeover, and reportedly lost nearly a third of its active users between December 2022 and January 2023.
Users have praised the app for making it easier to build a community with like-minded users, but have criticised its unwieldy user interface and the proliferation of online harms like child sexual abuse material.
