Elon Musk wants journalists to post directly on X

New change at X (formerly Twitter). The social media platform will soon change the appearance of news articles displayed in users’ news feeds.

Currently, news articles are displayed with a small preview card that shows the title of the article, a small summary of the text (the latter being reserved for the web) and the source website. With the new update, articles will no longer be displayed only with a link and the image of the article, without any additional information or context. The image will serve as a link to the article.

The change comes from CEO Elon Musk and was announced via his official account. “This is coming directly from me,” he wrote. “This will greatly improve the aesthetics”. Musk reposted the unofficial “X News Daily” account, which wrote “NEWS: X is changing the way news links display on the timeline. The title and text will be removed so that the links only show the main image of the article.

“If you are a journalist who wants more freedom to write and a
higher income, so publish directly on this platform!”

This announcement comes only after Musk implored members of the media to use his service, writing: “If you are a journalist who wants more freedom to write and a higher income, then publish directly on this platform!”

The X News Daily account offered some explanations for this decision, stating: “The change is supposed to help reduce the vertical pixel space that articles take up” and “It seems that another reason why Elon wants to change this is to reduce clickbait”. It could also encourage the media to publish articles about X, or at least use the Long post function to provide more context before the link”.

Just like last week’s announcement that the blocking function on X was going to be removed, no information about the date of the change has been communicated.

Source: “ZDNet.com “