It’s three months since the official change, and reports of the death of Twitter — as a name, that is — have been greatly exaggerated.
“This X shit’s got to go,” author Stephen King tweeted Thursday. That post received 71,000 likes by the end of the day. Elon Musk, creator of “this X shit,” responded to King with a “XX” and a winking-kiss emoji. Musk’s reply had a relatively tiny 7,300 likes at time of writing, despite the fact that Musk has 150 million more followers than King.
It was another humiliation for Musk, who has frequently tried to bring King, one of his favorite writers, on board with his controversial plans for the service. But it was also a crucial temperature-taking of the Twitter community. “Everyone literally still just calls it Twitter,” said one of the most popular replies. “I cannot explain to my friends what X is,” said another.
These are no mere anecdotes. A Harris Poll/Ad Age survey in mid-September found that some 69% of U.S. adults still refer to the platform as Twitter. A Chrome extension that scrubs all mentions of X from Twitter.com has more than 100,000 users. All of which raises an interesting question: If Elon Musk is trying to make fetch happen, and fetch doesn’t seem to be happening, and a significant chunk of his users say that fetch is never, ever going to happen … what happens next?
Musk owns the service, of course, and can call it whatever he likes. The company providing the service is legally known as X Corp. But the English language is a democracy, and if most of us are still calling the service Twitter, then Twitter it is. English itself is on the side of the 69% — or, to give them a more appropriate name, the Twitter resistance.
Musk is, as in many things, his own worst enemy here. The slapdash nature of the name-change rollout means that uses of “Twitter” and “tweets” are still all over the website, the app, the email communications. Most representations are beyond his control. The bird logo is embedded so many places on the internet and IRL, scrubbing it out would take years of work by more employees than … well, than Musk has already fired.
Ironically, given Musk’s propensity for media bashing, the media may be his biggest ally in making X happen. Some outlets such as Wired have changed their style guide to call Twitter X. Others use the “X, formerly Twitter” construction. If enough people over enough time read enough news about Twitter that calls the service X, and it rubs off on them, then you may not have to explain to your friends what X is anymore. The linguistic vote would start to tilt in Musk’s favor.
Twitter vs. X, round 1
Let’s recap, because you may still have a hard time believing that “this X shit” even happened. Reality sounds like a bad movie pitch: World’s richest man, having massively overpaid for one of the most beloved brands on the internet, kills it. World’s richest man has long been obsessed with the letter X, ignoring everyone who has tried to tell him how shady it sounds.
To drive the point home, this guy also thinks it looks cool to stick a massive “X” on the roof of the beloved brand’s office building (whose owner, by the by, says the world’s richest man has been stiffing him on the rent). It’s a brutal-looking X made out of lights so bright it blinds tenants in the apartments opposite.
At this point, a seasoned Hollywood executive might look incredulous. C’mon, this is like Biff Tannen from Back to the Future meets Mr. Potter from It’s a Wonderful Life! You’re making it too obvious what will happen next: some plucky group of underdogs restores the brand, because he can’t actually force people to use his name! No one is that much of a cartoon villain, surely?
Musk, by accident or design, was determined to make himself seem like a supervillain: “X Luthor,” as more than one Twitter user dubbed him at the time of the name change. Lex Luthor actor Jon Cryer tweeted about the similarity of X corp to that of the fictional LexCorp.
It was almost as if he was begging for a resistance movement to rise against him, as they so often do on Twitter. After all, Musk had handed his foes a perfect ready-made symbol — a bird, just like the Mockingjay worn by Katniss Everdeen in the Hunger Games series. “The bird is freed,” Musk tweeted when he took over a year ago; a Twitter resistance could use that very slogan.
Would the bird logo catch on? Would Twitter’s millions of users protest the change by switching their avatar to the bird? Would they go dark, like Reddit during a summer of protest, and only log on the bare minimum of times necessary to stop Musk seizing their accounts (which is, apparently, once every several years)?
And a King shall lead them
Well, no, not exactly. Twitter has certainly seen a decline in its daily active users, but what is remarkable is that it hasn’t declined further. More than 200 million people still use the service daily. A majority still call it Twitter, sure; they tweet (rather than post) jokes and memes about Musk’s weird X obsession and dead birds in cages. But they’ve also blithely accepted all the X imagery creeping in around the edges — the horrible faux-marble app icon, the design-school-reject logo — because what can you do, right? Just try not to pay attention to it!
Which is why King’s sudden intercession is so interesting. It’s not that the author was previously unaware of the “X shit”; he still posts very frequently, like many a Musk opponent who once claimed they would quit the service. In fact, he’s not going anywhere. King is taking a stand, pun very much intended, and he may well be the right leader for the moment. He’s folksy. His work is extremely popular in middle America and around the world, including with Musk and friends.
Why now? No reason necessary. We all get it, that moment when you’ve just had enough and vow that an intolerable thing cannot go on (certainly, this has happened to more than a few of King’s characters). The fact that the moment has come three months in makes it that much worse for Musk. King cannot be accused of rushing to judgment.
Whether King continues the charge against X, and whether other high-profile users will join him, remains to be seen. But by calling it out as he sees it, he’s already given the nascent Twitter resistance a powerful weapon in their fight for the old brand. Advertisers, always wary of a New Coke situation, may run away even faster from a service described by the world’s favorite horror writer as “X shit.”
Your move, X Luthor.