Musk plans to strip headlines from news articles on X

Billionaire Elon Musk, the owner of X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has shared plans to strip headlines and other text from posts that display a news article’s lead image.

The change, first reported Monday by Fortune, would mean that users — from individuals to publishers — would have to manually add their own text to posts and links that they share. Otherwise, the post will only display an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL. 

A source told the media outlet that Musk was pushing for the latest change, noting how it will help reduce the height of posts, allowing more posts to fit into the portion of the timeline that appears onscreen. The source added Musk said the change will help curb the clickbait problem on the site.

“It’s something Elon wants. They were running it by advertisers, who didn’t like it, but it’s happening,” the source told Fortune, noting Musk said news articles occupy too much space on the platform. 

Musk, who purchased the platform last October, noted the change when responding to a user’s post on the matter. 

“This is coming from me directly,” Musk wrote in an X post. “Will greatly improve the esthetics.” 

The switch come months after Musk announced the rebranding of the social platform formerly known as Twitter. X has undergone a slew of changes in the past months, including limiting the number of direct messages users can send and how many tweets they can see. 

Musk also announced last week plans to remove the ability to block individual accounts, later clarifying that users will still be able to mute accounts and block others in direct messaging.