In a move that signifies yet another bullet on a swiss cheese foot, Twitter has officially changed its domain from Twitter.com to X.com. This takes effect as of today(17/5), and all users attempting to access Twitter.com will now be redirected to X.com, which will be the new home of the social networking site.
On the login page of X, a message appears at the bottom, stating, “We are changing our URL, but your privacy and data protection settings remain the same.” This reassures users and the U.S. government that their personal data will be unaffected by the change in domain.
The change in URL signifies the culmination of the transition process that began when Elon Musk acquired Twitter and decided to rebrand the platform as X. While various elements of the platform, such as the official account, mobile applications, and premium subscriptions, have already been shifted to align with the new branding, the domain name change was the last major step in the rebranding process, as nobody likes the new one.
Past
Previously when trying to start the transition, Elon decided it was a good idea to simply rewrite the word “twitter” on all links in the iOS app to “x”, resulting in multiple scam links such as “netflitwitter.com” to appear as “netflix.com”, which could easily be used for cybecrimes of all kinds without anybody noticing.
Elon Musk has a personal history with the x.com domain. He originally launched a business under this name in 1999, which later merged with another company to become PayPal. He then tried to change paypal’s name to X, but thankfully Max Levchin, paypal’s co-founder noticed the idea was awful and declined.
“PayPal had become a trusted brand name, like a good pal who is helping you get paid. Focus groups showed that the name x.com, on the contrary, conjured up visions of a seedy site you would not talk about in polite company”
– Walter Isaacson, author of book about Elon Musk.
Good bye privacy
Now, if changing names was the only thing, that’d be fine. However with this change, the website no longer loads on certain browsers if your privacy settings is set to “strict” or “high”.
The page above was being shown to all firefox users, me included, who had the settings as mentioned. This is a clear message: “x” does not respect your privacy and won’t let you in if they can’t sell your data. Firefox devs are aware of the issue and are working on a fix.
Twitter, or X as it is called now, was previously found selling user data to the United States’ government, as it was linked above, which makes this entire situation both make more sense and much worse.
Could we all agree to move to Mastodon or BlueSky?
