Musk’s latest change to X platform has journalists infuriated

Elon Musk’s latest announcement to the platform X is reportedly upsetting journalists whose articles get shared on the platform. On Monday, Musk posted that X will soon remove the headline and text of articles and just retain the lead image from links to news articles that are shared.

“This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics [sic],” he wrote. Musk reportedly believes the new change will reduce clickbait. But journalists are furious and getting personal. Deputy editor at Foreign Policy magazine, James Palmer, said Must “comes up with a dumber idea every day” and that “the man has melted his brain with a cocktail of bad divorce and worse drugs.”

Fox Business writes that Musk’s changes are part of his pitch to make X a more relevant platform for content creators. Some changes include premium subscribers being able to post longer videos, their posts show higher up, and they also receive a cut of ad sales. Fortune was one of the first media outlets to comment on Musk’s change, believing the change to news articles will help to allow more posts to appear on each user’s timeline.

Fox Business reports that “dropping headlines from news articles would be the latest in a series of changes coming to X, the website formerly known as Twitter, since Musk acquired the platform last year in a $44 billion deal. And like many of Musk’s changes so far, users on the platform reacted with great skepticism, particularly journalists who know newsrooms rely on strong headlines to grab readers’ attention and drive traffic to their websites.”

“This isn’t small. This is disastrous for journalism, particularly independent journalism, which means democracy,” said Jeff Sharlet, a journalism professor and author at Dartmouth College. “Musk is doing absolutely everything he can to drive journalists off this platform,” said Peter Sterne, an editor at City & State NY.