Twitter’s iconic blue bird has flown away. Or rather, our feathered friend was put out to pasture along with the once-thriving social media platform’s highly recognizable name.
Rebranding the company “X” is the latest bird-brained idea from Elon Musk, who has been busily clipping Twitter’s wings ever since he bought the business for $44 billion last year.
Musk keeps alienating users, more and more of whom find themselves deleting the app with each of his irrational decisions. The ‘X’ rebrand is arguably worse than the imbecilic move of trashing the verified “legacy” checkmarks and putting the badges up for sale for $8 a month.
And among those who reluctantly choose to stay, many aren’t logging on as much as they used to, or rely less on the site, which has seen an increase in hate speech and misinformation as a result of Musk’s policies.
The question now is, how long until Musk’s madness — killing off an iconic brand logo — destroys the platform altogether?
Six out of 10 Americans said they took a break from Twitter for several weeks or more a few months after Musk acquired the social media service, while a quarter of those surveyed said they are not likely to use it a year from now, according to a recent study by the Pew Research Center.
The “X factor” could also lead to more deactivations, based on the thousands of likes on tweets — or “‘X’s” as the posts are now supposed to be called — ridiculing Musk’s latest move.
Musk, who has a thing for the 24th letter of the alphabet, tweeted over the weekend that changing Twitter’s logo to “X” is a way to “embody the imperfections in us all that make us unique.”
Meanwhile, CEO Linda Yaccarino rolled out a thread that is equally for the birds, ordaining the rebrand as a “second chance to make another big impression” and heralding “the future state of unlimited interactivity.”
Because what we all really need, Yaccarino thinks, is one single place where we can watch video, listen to audio, send messages — and do our banking, all at once.
For all his chatter about being one of a kind, Musk gets an “F” for originality. “X” isn’t fresh. It’s associated with pornography and used in algebra and in tic-tac-toe. There’s the mysterious, fictional “Racer X” in the classic “Speed Racer” cartoon. We could go on, but you get the point.
Musk has nearly destroyed the beneficial features of what was once Twitter. Now that he’s killed the bird with his ego and stone-cold foolishness, we wonder how long it’ll take before “X” migrates into oblivion.
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