As reported by Fortune, X is cooking up a big change in how news articles show up on the platform. The plan is to strip away the headlines and other text, leaving tweets/posts with links to display just the article’s lead image. Elon Musk spilled the beans on Monday night, revealing he’d given the green light to nix news headlines from X posts. So as soon as this update is released, links will only reveal the main image of an article.
This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) August 22, 2023
After the update, anyone looking to share a link will need to roll up their sleeves and manually add their own text to explain what it’s all about. This little twist might put a damper on how often news articles get shared. Elon Musk seems to think that by ditching headlines and meta descriptions from news pieces on X, there’d be more room in the timeline to showcase extra posts, and, on top of that, the feed would look better.
X’s owner also seems to be angling to lure in more journalists to write straight onto the platform and go rogue from traditional media outlets. Just recently, he shared a post saying that journalist who wants more freedom to write and a higher income should publish directly on X. It seems Elon Musk isn’t exactly on the same page with how some publishers operate as recently X reportedly delayed traffic to websites criticized by Musk.
With this shift in the platform, sharing news on X might start feeling a bit aimless. There is no doubt, as the saying goes that a picture is worth a thousand words. However, the news isn’t just about spinning tales based on a single image but sharing important information with people.
