Elon Musk strips news headlines from X, posing challenge for media outlets

X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites, including news articles, the latest change introduced by owner Elon Musk as he seeks to remold the social media company and reduce traffic to other sites.

Under the new format, posts linking to third-party news stories or websites automatically load those articles’ lead images in preview tiles along with their web domains - but with no headlines, depriving readers of key context from the publishers 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 advertisements, which still loaded with headlines, The Post’s review found.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.

The change comes amid a wider push by X to discourage users from clicking on external links, including links leading to news sites. “Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Musk said in a tweet Tuesday.

In response to earlier reports that X was testing the removal of headlines from article previews, Musk said that the revised format should be considered an aesthetic improvement. “This is coming from me directly,” he tweeted in August.

Journalism professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen at Cardiff University was skeptical about Musk’s claim that the change was driven by aesthetic considerations. She said that the new format could be part of a broader attempt by Musk to undermine news organizations’ reach on the social media platform.

“Although Elon Musk has framed this as a decision informed by aesthetic considerations, it can be seen as part of a larger trend toward making Twitter/X more difficult for news organizations to use,” she wrote in an email Thursday. “It is likely to have a significant adverse impact on click-through rates, because platform users will no longer have the necessary context to understand the content of links - and therefore little reason to click on them.”

Wahl-Jorgensen suggested that the change also could end up reducing user engagement on X itself, as well as on other news sites. “It’s likely to hurt the company’s bottom line by reducing the amount of relevant and engaging content on the platform.”

Musk has repeatedly framed traditional news media websites as direct competitors to X, a stance that contrasts with the platform’s previous model - where links to news media sites were accompanied by “verified” badges to shore up trust in their content. In April, the platform removed the verification badges from the accounts of some news sites that refused to pay $1,000 a month for it, continuing Musk’s years-long grudge against journalists who have reported critically on him.

In August, an analysis by The Post found that X briefly throttled traffic to third-party news sites, including the New York Times and Reuters, as well as the rival social media sites Facebook, Instagram, BlueSky and Substack. Users who clicked links to any of the affected websites were required to wait about five seconds before the pages loaded, according to tests conducted by The Post, potentially reducing traffic and ad revenue for the external sites. Links to other sites - including The Post’s - loaded in a second or less, suggesting the throttling targeted specific sites.

It was unclear on Thursday what the financial impact of X’s latest changes would be to news media sites, which can earn money from ad revenue generated by traffic.

According to a 2023 study by Oxford University’s Reuters Institute, the platform was the third most frequently used social media site in the United States for news, trailing Facebook and YouTube. A survey conducted by YouGov in January and February found that 14 percent of U.S. news consumers used Twitter for the purpose in comparison with 29 percent who used Facebook and 24 percent who used YouTube.

The change in article previews comes as Musk rolls back other policies that had been put in place to reduce the spread of misinformation and disinformation on the site, welcoming back thousands of banned accounts while laying off thousands of contractors the company had employed to monitor for slurs and threats, and triggering an increase in digital harassment against religious and ethnic minorities around the world on the platform.

- - -

Jeremy B. Merrill and Drew Harwell contributed to this report.