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X, the website formerly known as Twitter, has removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites, including news articles. This is the latest change introduced by owner Elon Musk to revamp the social media company and reduce traffic to other sites.
In the new format, posts that link to news or third-party websites automatically load those articles’ lead images along with their web domains into preview tiles – but without headlines, depriving readers of the editors’ key context about their articles, according to a review by the Washington Post on Thursday. The change also appeared to affect shared links to non-news websites, although it did not affect paid advertising, which was still full of headlines, The Post’s review found.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.
The change comes as part of a broader push by X to stop users from clicking on external links, including links that lead to news sites. “Our algorithm tries to optimize the time spent on X so that links don’t get as much attention because less time is spent when people click away,” Musk says said in a tweet Tuesday.
Responding to previous reports that X was testing the removal of headlines from article previews, Musk said the revised format should be viewed as an aesthetic improvement. “That comes straight from me,” he said tweeted in August.
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Cardiff University journalism professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen expressed skepticism about Musk’s claim that the change was due to aesthetic considerations. She said the new format could be part of a broader attempt by Musk to undermine the reach of news organizations on the social media platform.
“Although Elon Musk has portrayed this as a decision based on aesthetic considerations, it can be seen as part of a larger trend that is making Twitter/X more difficult for news organizations to use,” she wrote in an email Thursday. “It is likely to have a significant negative impact on click-through rates as platform users will no longer have the necessary context to understand the content of links – and therefore have little reason to click on them.”
Wahl-Jorgensen suggested that the change could also ultimately lead to a reduction in user engagement on X itself, as well as other news sites. “It will likely harm the company’s bottom line if the amount of relevant and engaging content on the platform is reduced.”
Musk has always traditionally framed News media websites as direct competitors of In April, the platform removed verification badges from the accounts of some news sites that refused to pay $1,000 a month for them, continuing Musk’s years-long grudge against journalists who had reported critically on him.
In August, an analysis by The Post found that users who clicked on links to one of the affected websites had to wait about five seconds before the pages loaded, potentially reducing traffic and advertising revenue, according to testing by The Post the external websites reduced. Links to other websites – including The Post’s – load in a second or less, suggesting the throttling targeted specific sites.
It was unclear Thursday what financial impact X’s recent changes would have on news media sites that can make money from advertising revenue from traffic.
According to a 2023 study by the University of Oxford’s Portal Institute, the platform was the third most used social media site in the United States for news, behind Facebook and YouTube. A survey conducted by YouGov in January and February found that 14 percent of U.S. news consumers used Twitter for this purpose, compared to 29 percent who used Facebook and 24 percent who used YouTube.
The change in article previews comes as Musk rolls back other policies This was introduced to curb the spread of misinformation and disinformation on the site. It reinstated thousands of suspended accounts while firing thousands of contractors the company had employed to monitor for slurs and threats This is leading to an increase in digital harassment of religious and ethnic minorities around the world on the platform.
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Jeremy B. Merrill and Drew Harwell contributed to this report.