By Adedapo Adesanya
X, the social media site formerly known as Twitter, has announced moves to strip headlines from articles shared on the site.
This is the latest move by the founder of the app, Mr Elon Musk, who has made a series of changes to the app he acquired for $44 billion in October last year.
According to Fortune, X will strip headlines from articles shared on the site. Posts would only include the lead image and the URL unless the person or publisher posting the link adds their text, per materials the outlet viewed.
After the publication of the article, Mr Musk confirmed these plans via the app, posting that “this is coming from me directly” and it “will greatly improve the esthetics.”
The change means that anyone sharing a link on X, from individual users to publishers, would need to manually add their text alongside the links they share on the service; otherwise, the tweet will display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL.
Although clicking on the image will still lead to the full article on the publisher’s website, the change could have major implications for publishers who rely on social media to drive traffic to their sites as well as for advertisers.
Earlier this week, Mr Musk wrote in an X post that journalists who want “more freedom to write and a higher income” should “publish directly on this platform!”
In July, he announced that Twitter would get a new logo, an X, replacing the distinctive bird logo and rebranded the app saying, “X.com now points to twitter.com.”
Mr Musk changed the company’s official name in April to X Holdings Corp, after his early venture X.com, to reflect his vision of creating a unified everything app that will perform the same function as social media and payment functions, similar to China’s WeChat.
