X moves to kill news on the social media platform chasing 'improved aesthetics'

Elon Musk has announced that all news links on X that redirect users to websites will be getting a facelift in the pursuit of making X a more aesthetically pleasing social media platform.

The social media platform formerly known as Twitter will soon be changing the way it displays news links on its timeline in an effort to make the social media platform's timeline more visibly attractive. According to a post that X owner Elon Musk replied to last Monday, X will be getting rid of the headline and just leaving the header image and link. According to Musk, this will "greatly improve the esthetics."

Before these changes, Twitter displayed a preview card of the post along with the headline and summary text. However, if Musk's change is rolled out, users will only show the image and the link. Moreover, if the publication or source of the post doesn't include any text with the link, users will only see the link and image for that article. So, why go through with this change? In short, Musk wants to reduce the height of a post in order to fit more posts on the screen.

Furthermore, Musk believes that removing headlines from news sources will reduce the rate of clickbait news. However, publications can get around this by including click-bait text within the image or before the link.