The X Man
Twitter leadership has formed a habit of either implementing or announcing inane plans every few days since Elon Musk completed acquisition of the platform late last year. The newest one is the dumbest yet.
When Musk announced plans to officially change the platform’s name from “Twitter” to “X,” I initially figured it was another one of his inane ideas that would be walked back in hours. It wouldn’t be the first time, such as when he banned a bunch of journalists for reporting negative info about him and the banning of promotions for alternative platforms. Both served as trial balloons that crossed the threshold of what users and, more importantly, advertisers would tolerate. But he went through with this one… largely. There are apps where the iconic Twitter bird remains present, and it still appears on platforms like TweetDeck. Tweets are still referred to as precisely that: Tweets. But the X otherwise subsumed the web app as of early Monday afternoon.
This is extremely stupid for several reasons. It’s chiefly terrible for branding. The move resulted in the euthanizing of the Twitter bird, one so iconic that it even made it to The Emoji Movie as a reference, and replaced it with an “X” that’s far too ubiquitous a letter to immediately identify when first mentioned in text-based and vocal conversations. It’s easy to hear “Did you see that post on Twitter?” and know what someone is talking about. It’s much harder to do so with “Did you see that post on X?” even after the change might be mentally baked in over time. Twitter has been around for so long that most people won’t stop referring to it as such, even as Musk had the logo on its headquarters changed.
It’s even dumber upon considering how Elon has always wanted to slap this name on something. The man’s quizzical fascination with X dates as far back as 2002, 21 years ago, when he first wanted to apply the rename to PayPal during his tenure as CEO. It didn’t go through thanks to a focus group thinking it sounded like the name of a porn site, a more poignant observation over time considering most sites with representative “X” logos are indeed porn sites. (You could also poignantly observe that Twitter itself is a porn site these days, because you can’t click a trending topic without stumbling onto images and videos of unmentionables.) He clearly never let this go, which explains the “SpaceX” and “Tesla Model X” names. He’s now finally gotten the chance to apply the full name to a company.
There’s every sign that Elon haphazardly forced this change on a clownish whim. The company had a few issues with the name switch on the official headquarters, in which police temporarily halted the process. This left merely the “er” of “Twitter” on the building, a fitting conundrum considering “er…” sums up everything that’s happened with the site in nearly the last year. There’s also no official name for the check-marked “Twitter Blue” subscribers beyond calling them verified. “X Blue” is a silly name, but hardly sillier than X itself. He also didn’t secure the “@X” Twitter name before the change, and only hijacked it after it was pointed out by other users and the press.
Lastly, there are CEO Linda Yaccarino’s explanations, enough to tell that her real job is to damage control Elon’s instinctual actions for the public and (again, especially) advertisers. They’re reminiscent of when Trump administration officials had to constantly explain and damage control former (and hopefully never again) President Donald Trump’s crazy tweets.
This, funnily enough, could also be illegal. Microsoft has owned a trademark for X in the United States since 2003, while Meta owns a federal trademark for a differently-styled X. Experts believe they won’t sue Musk and Twitter X (this won’t be easy) because of just how ubiquitous the letter is, which means other companies and organizations can feel free to name their products and services “X” too. This, more interestingly, has caused a conundrum in Japan by running afoul of the name “X Japan,” the popular rock band that’s been around for decades. Founder and front man Yoshiki tweeted that he thinks the name is “already trademarked” in Japan, which should prevent Twitter from taking the name in the country. I’d bet money that Musk and his lawyers didn’t bother checking to see this beforehand.
This entire fiasco is another reminder that anyone who’s heavily used Twitter in the past and isn’t insane should get active on other platforms. So many alternatives have risen in a little more than the last year that it doesn’t appear The One True Alternative will ever be established. Some users have gone to Threads, while chose Mastodon, or Bluesky, or CoHost, or… you get it by now. We might be at the end of one era of social media, and I have no idea what will happen next.
There’s no telling when Elon will sufficiently run this platform into the ground. My guess is that he’ll sufficiently devalue the platform, but it will nonetheless see enough usage over the next year-and-a-half that the owner could sufficiently allow the spread of misinformation to potentially alter the 2024 election. After that, he’ll sell its rotting corpse, Tumblr style. Either way, this will be painful for anyone who valued the original Twitter as a good resource for news and information, and perhaps Elon’s once-faithful followers too.
About The Author
Geoff
News Editor | Geoff is some nerd who writes for a blog and thinks he's knowledgeable. He write a lot about video games, but is capable of writing about other subjects, too. Twitter
