In the early hours of July 23, 2023, Twitter â the self-proclaimed digital town square â . Or did it?
Though itâs been more than half a year since the divisive rebrand, the platformâs web domain is still twitter.com â even . In billing reminders to X Premium subscribers, as viewed by CNN, the email states: âYour X (formerly Twitter) subscription will renew soon.â
It seems that, even though the logo was switched out and verbiage on the website changed, the platform still canât quite âbid adieu to the twitter brand,â as its new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, said in .
While some people (mainly fans of Musk) have embraced the X brand, most have not.
Many people, and in person, still call the platform Twitter, and refer to posts as tweets.
A handful of news outlets still describe it as âX, the platform formerly known as Twitter,â or some variation thereof.
Last month, when X CEO Linda Yaccarino spoke at a U.S. Senate hearing about social mediaâs failure to curb child exploitation, one of the victimsâ mothers referred to the platform as âTwitter, or now X,â in her video statement.
This may be, in part, to avoid confusion. Itâs also, according to experts, likely due to the psychology of design and branding.
Why many of us loved Twitter
Twitter launched publicly on July 15, 2006, and within a few years had built up widespread brand recognition.
It became one of the few companies âwith a product experience so unique that its brand name has become synonymous with a behavior,â Ramon Jimenez, Global Principal at brand consultancy agency Wolff Olins, told CNN via email. âWe âtweet,â we âgoogle,â we âuber,â and so on.â
Twitter pervaded every part of online life and popular culture. In 2011, the phrase âtweetâ was , with âretweetâ in the same year.
While Twitter was far from perfect, people flocked (no pun intended) to the platform.
For many, Twitter was a place to share their thoughts on major events as well as big milestones â from new jobs to engagements and travel. For journalists, it was a way to stay on top of cultural trends and reach out to potential sources. For public figures, it was a way to connect with followers and seem more approachable.
âThe name Twitter, that meant something to users,â Marty Neumeier, author, brand instructor and Director of Transformation at Liquid Agency â a brand agency â told CNN.
Then came the changes â and, eventually, the rebrand
After Musk bought the platform in October 2022 â six months after initiating the acquisition, which saw its share of controversies â Twitter quickly changed.
In an effort to reduce costs, âthe focus was âcut as many people as possible as quickly as you can,ââ journalist Zoë Schiffer told CNN. Her book, âExtremely Hardcore: Inside Elon Muskâs Twitter,â in which she recounts the experiences of Twitter staffers under Musk, came out on Feb. 13. These cuts included the majority of the content moderation team and many engineers. The result was an unstable platform and the elevation of misinformation, Schiffer said.
In early 2023, Twitter Inc., the platformâs parent company, became X Corp. Then, just over 17 years after Twitter went public, Musk that it was time to .
Musk has had for decades â he wanted to name his first startup X, which was one of the key reasons he had a falling out with his co-founders, said Schiffer. He also named one of his sons X.
âFrom the moment that he decided to buy Twitter, he starts telling his close associates, âThis is my chance to resurrect x.com.ââ
Musk was part of his push to transform the platform into âthe everything appâ â a place that seamlessly unites experiences into one interface, X said in .
While were integrated before the rebrand â such as Blue subscribers being able to upload hours-long videos and send â Muskâs vision wasnât fully realized at the time of the rebranding last year.
The fallout
The rebrand , especially when the logo was changed but the company was slow to update the website itself â the Twitter branding, including the words âtweet,â âretweetâ and âquote tweet,â were still on the site for days afterward.
Meanwhile, Musk continued to post about his preferred brand terminology, responding to users by saying that and that the should be reassessed. He has since walked this back, saying at The New York Timesâ DealBook Summit at the end of November that he prefers tweets to be called posts.
âAll the work that they put into Twitter and tweets and you know, all the cool terminology, that just got erased,â said brand expert Neumeier. Since the 1980s, Neumeier has helped big tech companies â including Apple, Adobe and Google â build their brands. He even worked as a brand consultant for Twitter briefly in 2013. âItâs as if it was crossed out with an X. Like, âyou canât have it anymore.ââ
While Twitter isnât the first big tech company to rebrand in recent years â think the parent companies of Google and Facebook changing to Alphabet and Meta, respectively â it is one of the most extreme examples.
The fact that many users didnât understand why Twitter was rebranded made it hard for them to accept the platform as X, all four of the experts CNN spoke to said. Schiffer said it is partly because the core platform itself hasnât really changed.
âI think itâs one thing to rebrand your company if youâre launching a completely new product and you really want to widen the scope of what your brand stands for,â said Schiffer. âItâs quite another thing to just slap a new name on an old product.â
CNN reached out to X, but it declined to comment.
With audio and video calling, the addition of the Grok AI onto the platform and peer-to-peer payments, which are coming later this year, X may finally be differentiating itself in a bigger way â although whether itâs enough for people to stop calling it Twitter remains to be seen.
While Muskâs fans were among the most vocal about liking the rebrand, they werenât the only ones. Schiffer mentioned that many former Twitter staffers were relieved when Musk announced the rebrand, because the company no longer resembled the one they had spent years building and protecting.
âSome of them really breathed a sigh of relief,â she said. âThey were like, âOkay, yeah, Twitter is dead.ââ
Brand marketers on why the name X isnât resonating
Twitterâs rebrand to X has so far fallen flat in mainstream culture, said Neumeier, because the name âgets lost in sentencesâ and âlooks like a misprint.â
Name changes take some getting used to, said James Withey, Global Executive Strategy & Innovation Director for brand specialist Landor â explaining that people would still call Nissan âDatsunâ for a while in the â80s.
The X rebrand may have a harder journey, Withey said, due to it being an unusual case of a high equity brand â one that was a cultural force for well over a decade â being renamed overnight.
âThe choice of new name doesnât help, in that it is just a letter and not evocative of the user experience, as Twitter was,â said Withey. âX also doesnât lend itself to being used as a verb â âIâm going to X about thisâ just doesnât have the same currency.â
Since the rebrand, some X users have continued to advocate for the platformâs former branding. When one account put out a poll asking what users call the platform, almost 95 per cent of the 33,210 votes were for Twitter. Other fans have created t-shirts with âI Still Call It Twitterâ emblazoned on the front.
On Reddit, fans of Twitter have taken their aversion to the X name to the extreme. After the rebrand announcement, one user asked whether an entire generation could file a class action lawsuit to prevent the new branding.
âYou have to remember what a brand is,â said Neumeier. âItâs the customerâs gut feeling about a product, service or company. So the brand is what they say it is⌠itâs not that customers canât stop calling it Twitter, itâs that they wonât.â