Musk escalates disputes with the media – and deletes the headlines at X

short message service
No more headlines on Twitter/X: Elon Musk continues to escalate his dispute with the media

Elon Musk keeps shooting at the media. With a new decision for his short message service, he is now pouring oil on the fire. At the same time he tries to lure journalists with an offer.

It’s his big vision for the short message service X, better known by its former name Twitter: owners keep emphasizing Elon Musk, he wants to make X the most important and fastest source of news, while at the same time attacking the traditional media. His latest coup: X will soon no longer display headlines on news links.

Musk confirmed this after initial rumours. “This comes straight from me,” he wrote in response to an X-post. “Fortune” first reported on it, citing inside sources. Instead of the previous links on news sites should no longer show a preview of the article with a picture and headline. Instead, the preview internally referred to as “map” should then only show the image.

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Aesthetics instead of news value

It’s all about the “aesthetics,” Musk claims, including spelling mistakes in the post. This would be significantly improved by omitting the headline. It shouldn’t be a coincidence that the actual added value of the card is destroyed. After all, sharing messages is rarely about just showing the associated image. The reference to the news content is completely missing without the headline. It must be copied manually by the sharing users into the existing text field.

Musk seems to at least accept the fact that this makes it more difficult and less attractive to share news from external sources. “He’s hoping for a decrease in clickbait,” Fortune quoted his source at the company as saying. Some advertisers had already been told about the idea in advance. “They didn’t like it. But it will come,” the source said.

It is not the first measure that Musk has taken against the traditional media. In the spring he replaced the verification system with a subscription model and punished a number of media companies that did not want to pay for the expensive company verification (find out more here). Instead of employing a press department, emails to the press address only receive the excrement emoji as a reply.

Old limit

The idea of ​​the cards still goes back to the old character limit of the service. For years, Twitter only allowed posts of 140 characters. The fact that the headlines no longer counted with the introduction of news tiles was a blessing for the media. Nevertheless, you have to keep it short: Because there is little space on the tile, it would encourage lurid lines, critics have argued for a long time.

But Musk should also be interested in something else: Instead of having to click on links and then leave X, users should ideally read the articles directly on the service. To do this, he had raised the text length limit for subscribers to his premium offer to up to 25,000 characters.

Open poaching

In another post, he openly courted journalists. “”If you want to work more freely as a journalist and earn more, you should publish directly on this platform,” he advertised in a tweet. In fact, for a few weeks now, X has been sharing advertising profits with users as long as they get enough views – and as subscribers themselves pay for the premium offer.

Realistically, however, this should only be of interest to English-speaking journalists and then only to a few: X only pays after millions of views, which can only be achieved with messages in exceptional cases. And: While the effort increases significantly with long texts, it would be significantly more profitable from an income perspective to send many short tweets that would be distributed more quickly. It would certainly not be an incentive against clickbait.

Sources:Elon Musk,fortune