No, I’m Not Calling It That, And Other Reflections on Musk’s Twitter Rebrand
Elon Musk has traded in the iconic Twitter blue bird for a lifeless black-and-white "X." Credit: Emily Stellakis '24
Late one Sunday night in late July, Elon Musk made the bizarre, illogical and downright sinister move to kill a beloved, 13-year-old blue bird – an iconic figure that has been reliably perched on my and your homescreens through an ever-changing social media landscape. RIP to that bird.
As for this new icon on my homescreen – a white Monotype letter “X” against a black background with a worn, grunge overlay (how innovative!) – you’re on thin ice. I remain, for now, on this disfigured platform that bears a mild resemblance to an app on which I once relied for quick news, comedy, One Direction updates, the like. Twitter has been rebranded; welcome to “X.” I can only rely on X to be glitchy and disappointing, with all its paywalled features and alarmingly lax content moderation. And no, I’m not calling it that. It will always be Twitter, even as the app grows more unrecognizable each day.
In the months since Musk’s chaotic Twitter takeover, we’ve witnessed the slow deterioration of a once-valuable platform into a place of unmitigated chaos and irrelevance. What’s left of the Twitter community has endured through a series of outlandish policy changes, massive staff cuts and a migration of many prominent voices to other, more stable social networking sites. If you’re still on the app, your experience is likely more unstable, more random, and more unhinged.
After Musk bought Twitter last year and cut thousands of its employees, the app has seen a sustained uptick in bugs and service failures. The algorithm is simply odder, with many users complaining about seeing more content in the new For You feed that they don’t want to see, as Vox reported. Musk’s “free speech” policy has turned Twitter into a haven for extremists. Under Musk’s leadership, Twitter has reactivated the accounts of known neo-Nazis, suspended journalists and amplified hate speech. Major news outlets PBS and NPR vacated the app in the spring after Musk falsely labeled them as “state-affiliated media.” And, the new pay-to-play model has rendered the site’s verification system completely ineffective, elevating the dishonest, impersonators, bots and trolls.
Musk’s latest move – the scrapping of the app’s iconic language-shifting branding – is perhaps the most puzzling. Twitter, one of the most recognizable social media brands, was so significant to everyday conversation that the act of posting on the app became its own verb. It’s unthinkable that Musk would kill that brand value as his $44 billion purchase hemorrhages ad dollars and teeters on the brink of collapse, with rival apps like Threads luring users. By abandoning the bird logo and all the associated words, Musk finally killed “Twitter,” though users have been prematurely eulogizing the app since his October 2022 acquisition.
Like many veteran users, I remain on this app, mourning the loss of the strange but remarkable online town square it once was: a space that birthed the hashtag, aided the rise of myriad social movements and provided real-time One Direction updates in my formative years. There is some weird stuff happening in that town square now. There is no app like Twitter, nor will there likely ever be again.