Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has made multiple changes to the platform recently including the name and logo of the company. In another major change that could come soon, Musk is now planning to remove headlines from news articles shared on X.
According to an article published by Fortune, Musk wants to chop off the headline and other text leaving only the main image used in article as link preview.
If the change goes live, anyone sharing a link on X would need to manually type the text themselves along with the links otherwise the tweet will only preview the image and no text.
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Clicking on the image will still take you to the full news article published on the source website, but as the report notes, this could cause a severe dent to publishers who rely heavily on social media for bringing traffic to their sites.
The change, which is said to be in the works presently, is basically aimed at reducing the height of tweets and allow more tweets to fit within the portion of the timeline visible on screen. Musk also believes that the change will help curb clickbait, which is when headlines are intentionally made misleading or sensationalised to attract higher number of clicks.
“It’s something Elon wants,” a source told Fortune. “They were running it by advertisers, who didn’t like it, but it’s happening.”
Musk wants journalists to write and publish their news article on X directly. The billionaire, on Tuesday, posted from his personal account, “If you’re a journalist who wants more freedom to write and a higher income, then publish directly on this platform!”
While Musk believes that the move can help curb clickbait, there are counter points to this as well. Removing headlines could lead to people seeing less news. This is because headlines give a sense of what the story is all about. Without headlines, there are chances that people may not click on the link. There are also chances that this could lead to spread of misinformation.
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