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Twitter Is Finally Dead. It’s X All the Way Down

Twitter is fully x.com now. Given its transformation since Elon Musk bought it, that may be a small mercy.

“The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth—like birds tweeting—but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video,” Musk wrote on the newly redubbed X last summer. It has also replatformed conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones, fostered a welcoming environment for porn spam accounts, made an absolute hash out of verification, introduced a monetization system that encourages rampant engagement farming, gutted its trust and safety team, allowed a surge in hate speech on the platform, designated NPR as “US state-affiliated media,” removed news headlines entirely and then reintroduced them in a weird spot, kneecapped a bunch of fun bots and third-party apps by introducing wildly expensive API changes while giving blue-check verification to AI-generated chum, pivoted to video, introduced an AI model that will help you do crimes, and overseen a decline in usage of over 20 percent in the US, according to app analytics firm SensorTower. He bought X.com back from PayPal in 2017, tweeting that it had “great sentimental value.” And he has seen Twitter as a vessel to create X on Earth since before acquisition was even completed, according to Musk biographer Walter Isaacson.

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