In August, Fortune exclusively reported that X owner Elon Musk and his team of engineers planned to remove headlines from news articles shared on the social media platform. In October, the change was implemented and headlines vanished. Now it’s a new year, and headlines are here again—but this time they appear atop an article’s main photo or image.
Or so it seemed at the start of the week. Then the headlines disappeared again. Now they’re back. And it’s only Jan. 4.
According to a source inside the company, this week’s now-you-see-them-now-you-don't headlines are a result of X working through some bugs. But headlines are definitely here to stay.
The original plan to nix headlines last year was pushed directly by Musk, as Fortune first reported, with the goal of reducing the height of tweets, thus allowing more posts to fit within the portion of the timeline that appears on-screen. The change meant that news articles shared on X would display only an image with no context other than an overlay of the URL. A tweet bearing an image of Joe Biden, for example, might lead users to an article about anything from foreign policy to election news—there was no way to tell. Not surprisingly, the change was met with a lot of user backlash, even as Musk defended the move, asserting that the change “will greatly improve the esthetics.”
So why are headlines back? “As usual, Elon said so,” the source said, adding that “user pushback” was responsible for Musk’s change of heart.
And to be fair, Musk was responsive to that pushback early on: He tweeted in November that “in an upcoming release, X will overlay title in the upper portion of the image of a URL card.”
As it turns out, the article headlines now appearing in tweets are in the lower, not the upper, portion of an image. But such hairsplitting is unlikely to be on the minds of many X users relieved to see headlines back in their feeds.
This change is the best of both worlds: smaller cards that still contain headlines, and one of the few times we’ve seen Musk reverse a decision by listening to X’s users.
X did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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