Elon Musk attacks the media and announces he will remove headlines from news articles shared on X (exTwitter)

The owner of X (formerly Twitter), Elon Muskannounced that it intends to eliminate headlines in its network that allow direct links to other media’s content, which will represent a major change in news and content traffic.

The intention would be to give X more visual weight and limit the text, which has been its most distinguishing feature so far.

“This comes straight from me,” Musk has said. “It will significantly improve the aesthetics.” While this change may not be to the liking of publicists, the billionaire will no doubt enforce his decisions as always.

The tycoon plans to change the format in which the links to news appear on the platform so that only the image appears, eliminating all traces of the headlines.

In a post published last night, Musk said he ordered “the headline/text removed so the links only show an image” of the article, and alluded to “cosmetic” reasons, though the intentions appear to be commercial. nature.

At the moment, its application has not yet started, because on the morning of this Tuesday (US time), the links were working in a traditional way.

While the exact way the measure will be applied remains to be seen (whether it will be equivalent to a ‘screenshot’ or have some other modality), the first consequence is that the media will no longer generate direct traffic through their appearance on X. .

premium option

Some analysts suggest that Musk’s decision appears to be aimed at forcing the media to subscribe to his network’s “premium” option, which has had very little success to date, thus reducing the network’s massive losses since its inception. suffered, to fade away. purchase by the billionaire last October.

This option could increase the number of characters that can be used in each “post” to 25,000 -in addition to videos-, but it also means that the media would have to create content specific to the X-Network in each article.

In another post last night, Musk further suggested that journalists make direct deals with his network to publish content, apparently behind or in parallel with their own companies.

“If you are a journalist who wants more freedom to write and a higher income, publish directly on this platform,” the controversial businessman writes.

It’s not the first time Musk has intervened in how media-published content is viewed; this year, the also CEO of Tesla and SpaceX posted and removed labels that read “government-funded media” and “media affiliated with the Estado.” from various public information media.

One of the consequences of these changes was that the American medium NPR, which had 8.7 million followers, withdrew from this social network.

Musk’s latest announcement also comes in the middle of a fierce battle with Mark Zuckerberg — creator and CEO of Meta — who just launched his own Threads network with the stated goal of competing directly with Twitter. (JO)

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