A month after Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as X, some users are still resistingthe change so much that they are finding ways to pretend it didn’t happen.
A month after Elon Musk rebranded Twitter as X, some users are still resistingthe change so much that they are finding ways to pretend it didn’t happen.
Using specially designed software tools, they are reinstating the old blue-on-white bird image on their devices in place of the new icon—a stylized, white-on-black version of the 24th letter. And they are reverting references to “posts" back to “tweets," along with other user experience options.
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Using specially designed software tools, they are reinstating the old blue-on-white bird image on their devices in place of the new icon—a stylized, white-on-black version of the 24th letter. And they are reverting references to “posts" back to “tweets," along with other user experience options.
“I just find the X so boring, and it’s kind of depressing. It just gives me a negative vibe," said Belinda Davey, a 36-year-old retail worker in Adelaide, Australia. She changed the app icon back to the bird on her mobile phone using a feature on Apple Shortcuts. Her post on X with a tutorial for how to do it has since garnered more than 1.5 million views. Many user replies also called for an Android version of the workaround.
Jettisoning the globally recognized Twitter name and logo is among myriad changes Musk has made to the 17-year-old platform since buying it in October, from upending its old blue-check-mark verification system to creating an algorithmic feed that has heavily featured his own tweets.
Some users have embraced the changes as part of Musk’s effort to reshape the microblogging platform into his vision of an “everything app" that will include offerings from long-form video to financial payments—along with less policing of what people can say on the platform.
Eric Wool, a 29-year-old who works as a media coordinator for the Tennis Channel, said he is encouraged by the X rebrand and that it makes him want to use the app more.
“The bird was a good start," he added. “But for how far the platform has come, it needed a sophisticated refresh."
Others saw the rebranding as the last straw in a disagreeable transformation, and vowed to flee for different social-media platforms.
Still others find the new name and look, among other alterations, upsetting or just unfamiliar—but they like the platform too much to leave.
Software engineer Jonathan Buchanan built Control Panel for Twitter, a software add-on for web browsers that allows users to make changes to the X interface.
The 41-year-old said the extension has more than 100,000 users and that growth in people using it has taken off since Musk took over and started introducing changes. He said the replacements for X branding were initially for his own benefit.
“I literally couldn’t find the tab," said Buchanan. He said it was a habit for him to build extensions to change any site he uses that he would like more features on.
More than 70% of all U.S. iOS reviews of X have been 1-star reviews since the rebrand in July, compared with about 50% in the previous 30-day period, according to estimates by market intelligence firm Sensor Tower. The most mentioned terms in all of X’s U.S. iOS reviews since the rebrand have been “Twitter" and “name."
In a statement, X said the company listens to feedback. The company also said that, according to its own sentiment reports, three in four people feel good or extremely positive about the rebrand.
Some still found the change unwelcome.
“To me, it’s not real," said Brittany Canales, a 24-year-old artist and art educator based in Austin, Texas. “No one around us is adapting to it, no one’s saying ‘I’m going to post this on X,’ everyone’s still calling it Twitter and tweeting," she said.
Canales took the app icon redesign one step further. Her app icon is now the bird, but with a hot pink background instead of the classic blue.
One of X’s own recent modifications gave users the ability to effectively undo an effect of an earlier Musk change to the platform.
Earlier this year, Musk revamped the old Twitter system of verifying users’ identities, instead offering the iconic blue check marks to those who paid for a subscription service now known as X Premium. Critics said the move made it harder to distinguish between authentic accounts and impostors, and the check marks have turned into a polarizing symbol.
This month, X introduced a new feature that allowed X Premium users to hide their check marks if they want to. Some users are choosing to hide their check marks, in some cases to avoid being associated with the changed meaning of the symbol.
Some people are using browser extensions to block users subscribed to X Premium as a way of clinging to the pre-Musk experience.
Ryan Gunther said using a blocker had become essential to him browsing the service. The 48-year-old, who works in tech support, said that watching posts disappear on popular X threads when running the software made it feel like he had “won the jackpot at a slot machine."
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