Twitter changes logo, name

Twitter is, or shortly will be, no more. Elon Musk, as he promised, has changed its name to the letter X.

From Twitter to X

Elon Musk announced the logo and name change for the platform today, on the platform itself. The first announcements came at 12:27 a.m. EDT.

He also offered this conditional statement:

Thus the actual appearance of the new X logo is not entirely clear. Several different versions of it have appeared, all of them speculative or mere teases, depending on the source.

But he had already left this statement:

indicating that he would retire the bird logo completely. He also left this hint as to possible style:

He also introduced a new features: job listings on user profiles of select companies. For now, this is available only to users in the United States.

CEO Linda Yaccarino left a more detailed thread describing the new X app in greater detail.

This was in fact Elon Musk’s goal: to create one app that would “do it all.” According to a person familiar with Musk’s efforts, he first attempted this with PayPal, which he created. But the technology did not yet support such vast integration. So he sold PayPal to raise the capital he needed to found his other companies. But now we must look at his acquisition of Twitter in an entirely new light. He did not buy it on a whim to protest online censorship. He bought it because he decided that the technology for X, as he wanted to invent it, had arrived.

The role of AI

Newsmax, through the Todd Starnes site, mentioned another change to come to the platform. They pointed out Linda Yaccarino’s statement that X would be “powered by AI.” Details on such “power” are lacking. The most likely uses for AI might be in two kinds of administration:

• Server administration – adjusting the load that the servers in Xs server farm would carry, and managing the overall load. And:
• Trust and safety administration – a kind of low-level moderator that would catch obvious Rules violations. It might directly act on some violations immediately and refer others to a human team.

The latter might be of the greatest concern to users – but also to the present Trust and Safety Team. The paltform has taken part in many “State actor” policies that are now the subject of:

• Two lawsuits against the federal government over their interaction with, and alleged threats to, the platform, and
• A RICO lawsuit against the platform itself by renegade journalist Laura Loomer.

The immediate question will be: will moderational decisions, by human T&S personnel and AI alike, be subject to appeal?