Every day we log on and open our favorite social media apps. Maybe yours is TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, or X—wait, X? Twitter’s new rebranding under the direction of owner and celebrity business personality Elon Musk has certainly been eye-catching and one of the most prevalent topics of conversation in the tech world and in pop culture recently.
Twitter was an online social media platform founded by Jack Dorsey, Noah Glass, Biz Stone and Evan Williams in San Francisco in 2006. It quickly became a social hub where users could tweet (post their thoughts, images and links), comment, quote/retweet posts and directly message (DM) other users. The widely successful and popular platform had over 330 million monthly active users by the start of 2019.
Multi-billionaire and avid Twitter user Elon Musk eventually set his eyes on the social media app in early 2021. Initially making an unsolicited offer, Twitter’s board responded with a defense strategy coined the “poison pill,” which included buying up great amounts of their stock in order to prevent a hostile takeover. Regardless of the fight put up, Musk successfully managed to buy them out entirely with a $44 billion price tag on October 27 of last year. Once he became CEO, he dissolved the board, several top executives and half the company’s workforce, causing many employees to lose their jobs and sharing how quickly Musk let them go. An ex-employee who worked as the Senior Community Manager, Simon Balmain, took to the platform after being fired and opened up about being “remotely logged out” and “removed from [the company’s] Slack,” ending with a sorrowful statement of regret on how his firing had been handled.
“And soon we shall bid adieu to the Twitter brand and gradually, all the birds,” new Chairman Musk said.
Changes are being made still today to the app and its website. Most notably, Twitter’s iconic blue bird logo has been rebranded as a monochrome X as of the end of July 2023. The change appears to be relevant to Musk’s long-standing fixation on the letter, as his many endeavors once included or still include the letter: X.com (now PayPal after a merger), SpaceX, Model X, xAI and so on. He even refers to his son by the name X! Imagine his eXcitement when X.com (formerly Twitter.com) finally became a concrete reality. But it isn’t without its faults, according to many.
The new name raised concerns for many, not limited to whole countries, as the letter X carries unfavorable connotations, with many explicit websites using the same letter for their URLs and branding. Due to its suggestive nature, Indonesia blocked the site very quickly after its rebrand in July. It simply did not adhere to the country’s strict laws on “negative” content and worried many due to the possible implications of the name.
Users have their fair share of criticism to offer as well. I mean, booting up your phone only for your eyes to fall on an almost villain-like organization named “X” in ominous steely black coloring instead of Twitter? On app stores and other app-installing platforms, countless former devotees to the social media platform have shared their opinions, leading to one-star reviews and frustration, as well as a multitude of attempts at popularizing lesser-known but similar apps like Mastodon or Bluesky. Given the sudden rebranding and Musk’s famously temperamental and idiosyncratic persona, it’s hardly a surprise that the rollout has been rocky.
“They should have left at least the logo [alone] to symbolize the Twitter icon,” Asmaa Yusuf (11) said. “Twitter being blocked from other countries is bad because most people have online friends or families from different countries that might only have that platform to speak on. All of the updates [will] make people not want to use the app anymore.”
The developments pose many downsides to the vast majority of users. Ebbing away at the imagery associated with Twitter, its maimed user base can only wait for what comes next. A platform for everything, from text and voice communication to video/photo/location sharing, similar to the app WeChat? Or a carbon copy of everything Twitter once was with nothing to change but a name or logo? Everyone awaits the future in store on what we now can call X.
