Elon Musk Decides ‘Who Needs Headlines, When We Can Just Have Pretty Pictures?’; Suspends Account That Made Fun Of Him

In August we wrote about a rumored plan of Elon Musk to remove headlines from the TwitterCards (are they now X-cards? who the hell knows?), basically making the site completely useless for news consumption. At the time Musk claimed it was somehow more aesthetically pleasing. Because that’s what everyone looks for in their news links: are they aesthetically pleasing?

Anyway, it’s gone into effect every news link on Twitter looks like it’s just a photo, and years and years of built in habits of how to (1) tweet about the news and (2) read news on exTwitter… are flushed away. Basically, links to news stories now appear just as the image associated with the news story and the only way to tell that it’s actually a link is to happen to notice the tiny white text in the lower lefthand corner, which is ridiculously easy to miss.

And that’s made a mess for news orgs that were used to using the tweet text to comment on the headline. The headline that is now missing.

Or you get situations like this, where people are commenting on the headline… and we have no idea what the headline even is.

Some people have been rightly complaining about this, though Elon seems pretty angry that basically everyone says this sucks. Here he is arguing incoherently with Box founder Aaron Levie:

This is not about “believing the media,” this is about exTwitter basically making it impossible to tell that something is a link. For no clear reason.

Of course, others quickly realized that this meant you could link to whatever you want and… well… add your own headline. And, plenty of fun was had at Elon’s expense.

I guess maybe it is aesthetically pleasing after all…

Of course, Mr. “Free Speech Absolutist” who has baselessly called people who annoy him pedophiles on multiple occasions, couldn’t allow anyone to make a joke over his new “aesthetically pleasing” news link displays by referring to him as a pedophile, so when a nonsense peddler — whose sole claim to fame is baselessly implying tons of people are pedophiles — highlighted the Juniper tweet above, Elon responded… and suspended the account.

I guess comedy is no longer legal on the new, more aesthetically pleasing exTwitter?

Of course, in true Streisand Effect fashion, now more people are learning about all of this and reporters are asking questions.

So, just to sum up, we have a very silly change that Elon made that makes news links basically impossible to parse on exTwitter, which opened up a fun form of trolling, which many people used to make fun of Elon Musk himself. One of those troll tweets jokingly called Elon Musk a pedophile, which is one of Elon’s own favorite go to moves when challenged. Another account, whose entire claim to fame is baselessly suggesting random people are pedophiles, highlighted this to Musk, and Musk (who pretends to be a “free speech absolutist” to the absolute most gullible people in the world who believe him), then suspended that account for breaking “X’s” rules (by which Musk means “offended Elon Musk personally.”) That user’s backup account was also suspended, but this post is long enough that we’re just going to leave it there.

Anyhoo, please don’t post this article to exTwitter, because everyone will just think it’s an image anyway and not click on it.

Updated: Basically just as this post went live, Elon unsuspended the Juniper account, so really, we’re back to content moderation by whims.

Updated again: And… an hour later, the account was suspended again. Whims, whims, whims.