What once was a thriving platform is now a failed attempt at an ‘everything app.’ The charm that Twitter once had has been long gone after wealthiest man in the world, Elon Musk, purchased it for $44 billion on Oct. 27, 2022.
One of the biggest changes that Musk has made was changing the name of the platform itself. ‘X’ is a complete 180 from ‘Twitter.’ It took a while for it to be fully implemented, but there are still many bird-named things in the app.
“It’s really stupid because Twitter is just Twitter,” Freshman Lillian Biggs said. “You can’t just change something like that when the name has been relevant to the brand for years.”
Musk didn’t even create the logo himself, the ‘X’ is from a Unicode made by Monotype, a company that specializes in creating typefaces. They’ve created multiple popular fonts, including Times New Roman and Arial. A quick look at the lowercase ‘X’ in their ‘Special Alphabets 4’ set shows that it’s identical to the logo presented by Musk.
“It would make sense to change the name if you’re rebranding the entire concept, but everything still works the same,” senior Melanie Contreras said. “There’s no reason for Elon Musk to continue advertising his brand if he’s already doing fine as one of the richest people on Earth.”
‘Twitter Blue,’ now known as ‘X Premium,’ is advertised as an opt-in, paid monthly subscription that adds a blue checkmark to your account and offers early access to new features coming to the platform.
“It leads to many things like impersonation,” Contreras said. “It makes it a lot harder to find celebrities and other famous people on Twitter because you cannot easily find their account if many people under that name are all verified.”
For $11 a month, some of the different things that users subscribed to the service have are the ability to edit their tweets after posting, make folders for their bookmarked posts, prioritize their replies under other people’s tweets and extend the character limit for posts to 10,000 characters.
“He prioritizes their comments and gives them features like the ability to hide their likes and stuff,” Biggs said. “That’s what Twitter Blue’s really about, anyway. He just favors a bunch of people that suck up to him.”
Hate speech has been running more rampant on the platform after Musk took over. Because of an attempt to make the app a place for free speech, people have started looking down at the app seeing it as a cesspool of negativity.
“It’s because of the looser regulations that Twitter didn’t have before that he’s implementing,” History teacher Bryan Looker said. “It’s up to others to decide if hate speech is a bad thing. I think it’s been worse than it had been six months ago.”
Musk has since tried adding new features to the app that users are not fond of. Some of these ideas include removing the ability to see quote-retweets under a post, adding a limit to how many posts a user could see in a day and charging people to use the platform as an attempt to get rid of bots.
“He was going to take away the block option, but I don’t think he ended up doing that,” Looker said. “I think the block option is important, even if I never used it.”
This isn’t the first time that the letter ‘X’ has appeared when it comes to other companies Musk has been a part of. Before the online bank he had created merged with another company and was rebranded into Paypal, it was called x.com. He’s also tried incorporating the letter into other companies such as ‘SpaceX,’ ‘xAI’ and ‘X Corp.’
“Before he had taken over, I rarely saw complaints pop up on my timeline,” Contreras said. “Now, I’ll see at least five tweets talking about something he’s done to the app. There are clearly many things wrong with the changes he’s made.”
