Why can't we stop calling it Twitter?
Twitter became X on July 23, 2023, after it was bought by Tesla founder Elon Musk for $44 billion (£34.2 billion).
But seven months on, why is everybody still calling it Twitter?
When Twitter became X there was a new logo - ditching the Larry the Bird, who had been Twitter's emblem since its creation in 2006 - and a variety of changes to how the site works.
But there are plenty of remnants of the original brand, including the platform's web domain, which is still twitter.com - even the new domain x.com redirects to the original link.
In billing reminders to X Premium subscribers, as viewed by CNN, the email states: “Your X (formerly Twitter) subscription will renew soon.” It seems that, even though the logo was switched out and verbiage on the website changed, the platform still can’t quite “bid adieu to the twitter brand,” as its new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, said in a post on the day of the rebrand.
While some people have embraced the X brand, others have not.
Many people, both online and in person, still call the platform Twitter, and refer to posts as tweets.
News outlets still often describe it as “X, the platform formerly known as Twitter,” or some variation thereof.
Last month, when X CEO Linda Yaccarino spoke at a US Senate hearing about social media’s failure to curb child exploitation, one of the victims’ mothers referred to the platform as “Twitter, or now X,” in her video statement.
This may be, in part, to avoid confusion. It’s also, according to experts, likely due to the psychology of design and branding, CNN found.
Why are people so attached to Twitter?
Twitter launched publicly on July 15, 2006, and within a few years it had built up widespread brand recognition. It became one of the few companies “with a product experience so unique that its brand name has become synonymous with a behaviour,” Ramon Jimenez, Global Principal at brand consultancy agency Wolff Olins, told CNN via email. “We ‘tweet,’ we ‘google,’ we ‘uber,’ and so on.”
Twitter has spread across the online world and into popular culture.
The word “tweet” was added to the Merriam-Webster dictionary in 2011, with “retweet” added to the Concise Oxford English Dictionary in the same year.
For many, Twitter was a place to share their thoughts on major events, get recommendations for anything from restaurants to dating scenarios, and share big milestones, from new jobs to engagements and travel.
For journalists, it was a way to stay on top of cultural trends and contact potential sources.
For public figures, it was a way to connect with followers and seem more approachable. “The name Twitter, that meant something to users,” Marty Neumeier, director of transformation at Liquid Agency, a brand and marketing organisation, told CNN.
But the social media platform saw huge changes after Mr Musk completed his purchase of Twitter, six months after he initiated the deal in April 2022.
One of the most controversial changes was huge cuts to staff numbers.
"These cuts included the majority of the content moderation team and many engineers. The result was an unstable platform and the elevation of misinformation," journalist Zoë Schiffer told CNN.
Some staff said they had their laptops unexpectedly wiped during the mass layoffs, and Twitter founder Jack Dorsey apologised to the company's employees. In early 2023, Twitter Inc., the platform’s parent company, became X Corp.
Then, just over 17 years after Twitter went public, Mr Musk started posting on the site that it was time to rebrand the platform to X.
A brightly flashing “X” sign was removed from the San Francisco headquarters of the company formerly known as Twitter just days after it was installed following complaints from neighbours
Mr Musk has had an affinity for the X branding for decades. He wanted to name his first startup X, which was one of the key reasons he had a falling out with his co-founders, Ms Schiffer said.
He also named one of his sons X Æ A-Xii. “From the moment that he decided to buy Twitter, he starts telling his close associates, ‘This is my chance to resurrect x.com,’” Ms Schiffer said. Mr Musk said the Twitter rebrand was part of his push to transform the platform into “the everything app,” which would seamlessly unite experiences into one interface, X said in a blog post in January. While some new features were integrated before the rebrand, such as Blue subscribers being able to upload hours-long videos and send voice memos in direct messages, Mr Musk’s vision hasn't yet been fully realised.
Tweets or Xs?
The rebrand caused a wave of confusion online, especially when the logo was changed but the company was slow to update the website itself. The Twitter branding, including the words “tweet,” “retweet” and “quote tweet,” was still on the site for days afterward. Meanwhile, Mr Musk continued to post about his preferred brand terminology, responding to users by saying that tweets should now be called “Xs” and that the entire concept of retweeting should be reassessed.
He has since rowed back on this, saying at The New York Times’ DealBook Summit at the end of November that he prefers tweets to be called posts.
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“All the work that they put into Twitter and tweets and you know, all the cool terminology, that just got erased,” brand expert Mr Neumeier said.
While Twitter isn’t the first big tech company to rebrand in recent years - the parent companies of Google and Facebook changing to Alphabet and Meta, respectively - it is one of the most extreme examples. The fact many users didn’t understand why Twitter was rebranded made it hard for them to accept the platform as X, all four of the experts CNN spoke to said.
Ms Schiffer said it is partly because the core platform itself hasn’t really changed. “I think it’s one thing to rebrand your company if you’re launching a completely new product and you really want to widen the scope of what your brand stands for,” she said. “It’s quite another thing to just slap a new name on an old product.”
X is becoming more of a multi-function platform, with the introduction of audio and video calling and a payment feature.
Some former employees are among the people who were happy about the rebrand, marketing expert Ms Schiffer said, as the company no longer resembled the one they had spent years building and protecting.
“Some of them really breathed a sigh of relief,” she said. “They were like, ‘Okay, yeah, Twitter is dead.’”
Why can't we stop saying 'Twitter'?
The rebrand has struggled to take hold in mainstream culture because of the name 'X', Mr Neumeier said.
The single letter, which is also a roman numeral and a cross symbol in its own right “gets lost in sentences” and “looks like a misprint," he said.
Name changes take some getting used to, James Withey, global executive strategy and innovation director for brand specialist Landor said, highlighting that people still called Nissan "Datsun" for years after its rebrand in the 1980s.
The X rebrand may have a harder journey, Mr Withey said, because Twitter was a cultural force for well over a decade before it was renamed overnight.
“The choice of new name doesn’t help, in that it is just a letter and not evocative of the user experience, as Twitter was,” Mr Withey said. “X also doesn’t lend itself to being used as a verb - ‘I’m going to X about this’ just doesn’t have the same currency.”
Since the rebrand, some X users have continued to advocate for the platform’s former branding.
When one account put out a poll asking what users call the platform, almost 95% of the 33,210 votes were for Twitter.
Other fans have created t-shirts with “I Still Call It Twitter” emblazoned on the front. On Reddit, fans of Twitter have taken their aversion to the X name to the extreme. After the rebrand announcement, one user asked whether an entire generation could file a class action lawsuit to prevent the new branding. “You have to remember what a brand is,” Mr Neumeier said. “It’s the customer’s gut feeling about a product, service or company. So the brand is what they say it is… It’s not that customers can’t stop calling it Twitter, it’s that they won’t.”
The X press office did not respond to ITV News' request for comment.
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