You might need to act soon to keep accessing your X account.
Elon Musk’s website, formerly known as Twitter, quietly announced it was killing off the old Twitter.com domain. That means the company is requiring users who use a hardware security key or passkey to re-enroll; otherwise, they will be locked out of their account.
X’s safety account posted a statement alerting folks to the change. It read:
Elon Musk has agreed to settle a $128m (£100m) lawsuit brought by four former top executives at Twitter, now X, over unpaid severance when he took over the company.
The executives, who include former chief Parag Agrawal, argued that Mr Musk fired them “without reason” after he bought Twitter in 2022 and denied them severance payments.
“The parties have reached a settlement and the settlement requires certain conditions to be met in the near term,” attorneys for the plaintiffs wrote in a court filing last week. They did not disclose the terms of the settlement.
The suit, filed last year, is one of several legal challenges over unpaid severance for workers who were laid off after Musk took over.
This month, Threads announced that it reached 400 million monthly active users — nearly as many as X (née Twitter). That’s almost half a billion people.
Threads is the Big Bang Theory of social media. Bland, boring, largely unoffensive, and somehow, it was the most popular show on television for years. Game of Thrones got the cultural and critical attention, but Old Sheldon retained a steady audience of nearly the same size. At any given time, “Twitter” and “X” are searched somewhere between 12 and 30 times more than “Threads” on Google, according to the search engine’s Trends data. Threads is a popular platform without much of an identity. And maybe that’s a good thing: X’s cultural relevance is inseparable from the constant churn of Elon Musk drama, just like how Game of Thrones’ cultural legacy is forever tied to its spectacularly bad final season.
X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, has begun serving its users with a weird new ad format and it’s one of the company’s least transparent products yet.
The rollout of these ads also provides the public with a hint regarding just how much the company is struggling to attract advertisers.
Multiple X users have reached out to Mashable over the past few days to report seeing a new type of ad in their For You feed that they had not previously come across on the platform. These new X ads don’t allow users to like or retweet the ad posts. In fact, the new ad format also doesn’t disclose who is behind the ad or that it is even an advertisement at all.
Elon Musk has a new idea on how to make X…better?
As first reported by Fortune, and then confirmed by Musk himself, Twitter’s owner plans to strip headlines from news articles shared on X (ex-Twitter).
Right now, links to news articles are displayed as “Cards,” consisting of an image, a link, a headline, and a summary of the article, which doesn’t count against X’s post-character limits. If Musk goes through with his idea, links to news articles would be stripped from all text, leaving just the lead image and the URL as the links to the actual article.
Of course, the user sharing the news article will be able to fill in the blanks themselves in the tweet, though it’s definitely not certain that they will do so.
Twitter has removed the iconic bird logo and adopted ‘X’ as its official logo. This move comes after Elon Musk announced the change over the weekend. The change is already live on the website.
Notably, Musk tweeted that x.com now also redirects to twitter.com. In the post, Musk also called this an “interim” logo, so we might see another logo change in the future.
The social network might not stop at just replacing the logo. Musk said the company will eventually “bid adieu to the Twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds.”
Late Sunday, Musk changed his profile picture to the new Twitter logo. Twitter’s official account @Twitter has also changed its name and display picture to the new X logo.
It seemed like exactly the type of juicy hypocrisy that the internet lives for.
On Monday, Instagram head Adam Mosseri announced that in order to tackle the spam problem on its new Twitter competitor, Threads, the company was going to introduce tighter rate limits on the platform.
Sounds familiar? That’s because rate limits were one of the controversial decisions implemented by Elon Musk on Twitter in early July that resulted in massive backlash against the platform. Users were finding themselves blocked from seeing content on Twitter due to daily rate limiting, after viewing a certain number of tweets.
But, as it turns out, no, Threads did not deploy the same controversial rate limits on its platform that Twitter did. Threads instead strengthened the same type of rate limits present on most all social media platforms, limits that even Twitter used long before Musk even acquired the company.
Facebook has tried to compete with Twitter in numerous ways over the years, including copying signature Twitter features such as hashtags and trending topics. But now Facebook’s parent company is taking perhaps its biggest swipe at Twitter yet.
Meta on Wednesday officially launched a new app called Threads, which is intended to offer a space for real-time conversations online, a function that has long been Twitter’s core selling point.
The app appears to have many similarities to Twitter, from the layout to the product description. The listing, which first appeared earlier this week as a teaser, emphasizes its potential to build a following and connect with like-minded people.
Microsoft is dropping Twitter from its advertising platform next week, nearly two months after Twitter announced that it will begin charging a minimum of $42,000 per month to users of its API, which include enterprises and research institutions.
Users began receiving emails about its new pricing details in early March, per a Wired report that observed at the time that the new pricing scheme “prices out nearly everyone.”
With its $2.15 trillion market cap and roughly $100 billion cash on hand at the end of last year, Microsoft obviously has the money to pay Twitter what it wants, so the move appears to be a bit of a statement, even as Microsoft is declining to elaborate further about its decision.
You can still find hate speech on Elon Musk’s Twitter. But now, some of it will come with a warning label.
According to Twitter, the company will start rolling out new warning labels on tweets that break its “Hateful Conduct” rules. Tweets with this label will have “limited visibility” on the platform, meaning that Twitter’s algorithm will reduce its reach — that is, fewer people will see the content, as its ability to be found via search or discovered via recommendations will be stifled.
Dispatches From The Front 