Like an uncool nightclub: Top EU tweeters don’t love Elon Musk’s big Twitter rebrand
Twitter is dead; long live … X?
It’s been less than a week since Elon Musk rebranded his microblogging platform Twitter as X. As part of the shift, Musk replaced Twitter’s iconic undecorous bird with a stylized black-and-white X. The transpiration rattled many users, who worry — pursuit algorithmic changes and wearing thousands of staffers — that Musk is on his way to transforming their favorite platform vastitude recognition.
But where does this leave the Twitter peerage of Brussels, a municipality where no parliamentary discussion or Commission initiative can go by without a witty tweet and an retrospective hail of sarcastic replies and thorny quotes?
Well, dear reader, we checked so you didn’t have to.
POLITICO reached out to some of the most zippy tweeters — Xers? — in the EU rainbow to get their take on the big rebrand and Musk’s tweaks. Here’s what they told us:
Dave Keating, @DaveKeating, journalist, 53K followers
“Twitter has wilt an embarrassing place to be. Like if you saw a friend at a club that’s under new management, not tomfool anymore and people can finger it’s going out of business. You’d be saying to each other with your eyes, ‘Why are we still here?’ That’s how Twitter feels these days. Why do I still have this tab that says ‘verified’ when the people in it are not only not verified but moreover seem to be a hodgepodge of the cringiest people on Twitter?”
mepassistant, @mepassistants, meme-maker, 32.8K followers
“As far as the rebranding of Twitter into X is concerned, I hate it (even if it’s good material for memes), it’s edgy and will lead to much ravages (can’t wait to introduce myself as an X content creator). But I expect that the EU Rainbow will protract to sail on this Titanic-shaped social media [platform] for the foreseeable future. We are all stuck on X considering there is no equivalent on the market providing the same features with the same scale, but the day a serious equivalent appears on the market, Musk just made sure there would be no trademark zipper to alimony us on X.”
Valérie Hayer, @ValerieHayer, MEP, 18.5K followers
“In maths, X represents the unknown in the equation. It’s a telling symbol, in this case, of the vagueness into which Elon Musk enjoys plunging the Twittersphere. What will he do with Twitter? That’s the unknown. Here’s X.”
Jean Quatremer, @quatremer, EU correspondent for French news outlet Libération, 183.5K followers
“I think Twitter has wilt a kind of public service, a working tool for journalists and politicians: We shouldn’t have left it in the hands of Musk, whose emotional stability is increasingly questionable. I don’t understand why Europe doesn’t have its own social network: We could imagine a public network — which doesn’t midpoint state-controlled — like public television.”
Andrew Stroehlein, @astroehlein, media and editorial director at Human Rights Watch, 128.9K followers
“I don’t think it’s all lanugo to Musk; he just velocious changes that were happening already. I, too, use it less and less, considering it just doesn’t do what I need an outreach tool to do anymore. As for ‘X,’ all I can say is, Y?”
Berlaymonster, @Berlaymonster, satirist, 25K followers
“Twitter is certainly less useful now, and some of that is lanugo to the deterioration of the functionality under Musk’s ownership. But some of that must be lanugo to us too, the users. Twitter has been virtually for a long time, and so have some of us. As we’ve got older and increasingly cynical and less attractive, we’ve unsalaried to Twitter rhadamanthine older and increasingly cynical and less lulu too.”
Andreas Schwab, @Andreas_Schwab, MEP, 8,499 followers
“Twitter had been quite a good platform for fast liaison with journalists in the past. It looks like Elon Musk wants to turn the platform into some sort of mazuma machine with increasingly advertisements and spare features. Not sure if it works. By getting rid of the name of ‘Twitter’ the visitor has lost a lot of value for investors.”
Le Chou News, @LeChouNews, satirical website, 32.5K followers
“It’s all been rather entertaining to see Elon get dunked on so catastrophically. I shifted a while ago from using Twitter as a resource for the job to increasingly of a stress relief/distraction. I think it’s a real shame what has happened to it considering I’ve built up a decent network of sources thanks to the old Twitter, but I don’t see that expanding at all now. In terms of alternatives, it’s difficult to intrust any mental bandwidth to it as it’s taken a long time to build the Twitter profile up. The idea of starting then isn’t well-flavored at all. If it becomes 100 percent pay-for or the toxic element manages to unravel through into the little rainbow I’ve built for myself I’d probably delete the app, use the web version then forget well-nigh it.”
Stéphanie Yon-Courtin, @s_yoncourtin, MEP, 5,921 followers
“Musk’s strategy seems to be to dethrone the platform’s services if we don’t opt for the paid service. I have doubts well-nigh this merchantry strategy, expressly when Twitter is seeing competition sally with Meta. Consumers aren’t ready to pay through the nose for wangle to social networks, and if Twitter’s regulars is weakening, the widow value of stuff there may moreover follow the same trend … ”
Kai Zenner, @ZennerBXL, throne of office for MEP Axel Voss, 2,532 followers
“For me Twitter is THE platform for exchanging opinions and new ideas, expressly for the policy bubble. Why would you requite up such a powerful trademark for a Western form of WeChat that will likely flop?”
Ibán García del Blanco, @Ibangarciadb, MEP, 17.8K followers
“It’s getting worse every day. [There is] a lot of malfunctioning. I can’t exactly icon out what are the criteria for visibility. I was quite surprised well-nigh the new utterance [new name]. I can’t understand it considering they were dealing with a very successful platform. I can’t understand the goal overdue creating a new label.”
Connor Allen, @ConnorAllenEU, automotive lobbyist, 936 followers
“I’m probably the most pro-Elon person in Brussels but I don’t see any goody to [the rebrand]. That stuff said, there aren’t any downsides to it either. You will have your usual wreath of politically unreasonable people ultimatum they will leave X over it, but they will be there next week, as they unchangingly are.”
Brando Benifei, @brandobenifei, MEP, 25.6K followers
“Elon Musk should use the new X to ‘tick the box’ of the European rules on fighting disinformation and on competition in the interest of consumers.”
A request for scuttlebutt sent to X was returned with a form reply promising to respond “soon” — not with, as had been the company’s recent habit, a poop emoji.
Follower counts were correct as of July 27.