Twitter will henceforth be known as ‘X’. The name change was initiated by Elon Musk, its present owner. Why?

Name changes are meant to represent something new. In October 2021, Mark Zuckerberg changed the name of the parent company of Facebook to Meta. This was to signify where he saw the internet headed, a metaverse, a kind of immersive internet. And the company also now included WhatsApp and Instagram, so he didn’t want the company’s name to be identical with that of its main app. Well, the meta projects of the company are not so hot now, although the name change remains.

Musk’s motivations remain a mystery. He also has plans to move the social media platform into new areas such as audio and video services, and even banking. But beyond changing the name of the parent company to X. Corp (earlier this year), he is now also changing the name of the app, Twitter, and its logo. These are only the latest in his makeover of the company. His actions have included extensive retrenching of employees, introducing a charge for verification of source, and changes in content moderation policies.

Twitter had rapidly become a household name when the app beginning in 2006 provided its service of short, instant messages to large numbers of followers. World leaders made it a habit of using Twitter to make their views and pronouncements known. The logo of a little blue bird was inviting. Like Xerox for copying, Twitter became a verb root and people would not send messages but tweet, like the blue bird. All that goodwill is now flying away.

Negative connotations

Now, along with the company’s name, the logo has changed from the blue bird to an ‘X’. That’s intriguing, since X has many connotations, few of them positive. It is mainly a symbol of the ‘negative’ as against a check mark for approval. X-rated films are not what we want shown in our theatres and segregate them to the shady parts of town. The laggards in school shudder at the number of ‘x’s the teachers mark in their answers. Can you think of a positive connotation for ‘x’?

Twitter’s biggest boost must surely have come from former US President, Donald Trump. Trump was known to tweet messages at all hours of the day and night. As many government officials themselves came to know of his decisions only from his tweets, he was often seen as running the country through tweets. Since the messages had to be short, there was a whole cottage industry of experts who would try to interpret the tweet and reason out the cause.

Trump’s remarks on Twitter during the January 2021 riots around the US Capitol were seen as incendiary and the company banned him. But less than two years later, under Musk’s ownership, Trump has been reinstated. Not many see this as Musk’s support of free speech. Post-Musk’s 2022 acquisition of Twitter, it now has a challenger in Threads, launched by Meta Platforms recently. Threads drew a phenomenal user base of 100 million within a week of its launch in July, although that number has fallen by more than half. It is reported that there has been a 50 per cent drop in Twitter’s advertising revenue as many advertisers have cut back due to his changes in content moderation.

Of course, none of this has fazed Musk. Since he rivals only Trump in his ability to say and do outrageous things and remain in the headlines, we can be sure that he has many more tricks up his sleeve.

Musk wants to make ‘X’ a super app, like WeChat is in China through which everything can be done. Or perhaps nothing. And we know from our school algebra that an unknown variable is usually called ‘x’ while we work at solving the equation. Perhaps that is where Twitter is now.

The writer is an emeritus professor at Suffolk University, Boston