Elon Musk Swipes Control of Another Twitter Account, This Time @Music
For 16 years, Jeremy Vaught had control of the @music account on Twitter. But no more.
On Thursday, Elon Musk’s company seized the @music account out of the blue, offering no advanced warning to Vaught or any compensation.
“Super pissed,” he wrote on his own personal Twitter account while sharing a screenshot officially notifying him about the account takeover.
The account is the latest casualty in Musk’s ongoing effort to rebrand Twitter into X. Last week, the company did the same with the @X account, seizing it from a San Francisco man named Gene X. Hwang, who originally registered the account 16 years ago.
In Vaught’s case, Twitter previously used the @TwitterMusic account to promote new tunes and artists. But the account has since been shut down(Opens in a new window). Instead, someone at the newly renamed X decided to migrate all the content and followers on @TwitterMusic to the @music handle. Following the seizure, the new @Music account posted an image of singer Ed Sheeran holding up a sign that contains the letter X.
The change suggests Musk’s company might be working on a new music-streaming service for X, which is being overhauled to become a “super app." But in the meantime, Vaught’s own posts on @music have been offloaded to his new handle, @musicfan.
In an interview, Vaught tells PCMag he’s well-aware he had “no inherent rights” to the @music handle. “Everybody knows that building on somebody else's platform, there is a potential for them to take it away,” he said. “But after creating [the @music account] in 2007 and keeping it going all this time, it is shocking to just have it ripped from me.”
Vaught, who lives in Ohio and works as the director of engineering at a nonprofit(Opens in a new window),
Read more on pcmag.com
