Elon Musk’s Latest Proposed Change to His Social Platform Angers Journalists

Elon Musk attends The 2022 Met Gala Celebrating "In America: An Anthology of Fashion" at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York on May 2, 2022. Dimitrios Kambouris/Getty Images for The Met Museum/Vogue

Elon Musk said he will change how news links appear on his social media platform X, formerly called Twitter, which sparked immediate backlash from publishers and journalists.

X is planning to remove the headline and text while using just the lead image from links to news articles that are posted on the platform, Mr. Musk wrote late on Monday.

“This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics (sic),” he wrote.

Currently, news links come up on the timeline of users as “cards” along with an image, source address, and an abridged headline. Such packaging helps draw clicks and helps publishers gain readers. But with the shortened links, users might end up writing some text along with their posts.

With the changes, Mr. Musk has been pitching X as a more relevant platform for content creators. Premium subscribers can now post longer videos, their posts are shown higher up, and they also receive a percentage of ad sales.

There was speculation that the change would get users to spend more time on X and sign up as a subscriber rather than leave the site for outside content. Others speculated that it would shorten the height of news posts on the platform, allowing more posts to appear in each user timeline.

Jeff Sharlet, a journalism professor at Dartmouth College and bestselling author, claimed that the change would be “disastrous for journalism, particularly independent journalism, which means democracy.”

Dustin Walsh, a reporter for Crains Business Detroit, claimed that the planned change will likely cause more news outlets to leave X.

“Most journalists prefer Twitter to other outlets, but the reality is for non-NYT, WaPo, etc. outlets, Twitter isn’t an effective click through platform,” Mr. Walsh wrote. “WAY more people get their news from Facebook. This will only exacerbate this. Twitter is not real life and it shows.”

But Mr. Musk appears to want journalists to write their content directly on X itself, rather than a news website. He said in a post that journalists who want “more freedom to write” and “higher income” should post their articles directly.

It comes several days after Mr. Musk said X will be removing the ability of users to block unwanted followers, sparking negative reactions from some users. His post received a Community Notes tag claiming that such a move is impossible due to Google Play and Apple Store rules.

“It makes no sense,” Mr. Musk said of the block feature, saying it would be deleted except for direct messages.

But some users said that the feature is needed to prevent harassment.

“It makes an insane amount of sense,” the @WarClandestine account wrote. “If I don’t have a block button, my comments would be filled with bots, bad actors trying to associate me with hateful content, people trying to promote their content in my comments, NAFO imbeciles spamming with disinformation,” it said. “Block is necessary.”

Conservative commentator Matt Walsh wrote that the move was “not a good idea,” but Mr. Musk stated that a new version of the block feature “will be better. Watch.” He didn’t elaborate.

Another conservative poster said he was simply blocked by Mr. Musk after voicing his dissent over removing the feature.

“Pretty fun blocking people who complain that blocking is going away,” Musk posted on Sunday. “How does the medicine taste?”

Reuters contributed to this report.