Elon Musk to Headline Writers: Drop Dead

pcmag.com:

The context collapse has escalated at the site formerly known as Twitter: Starting sometime yesterday, the previews that X automatically generates of shared links now strips them of headlines and displays only the lead art and the link’s domain name in the bottom-left corner.

For example, the preview card for my share of the story I wrote yesterday about Android 14 consisted of a header image we ran from Google PR, stamped with “pcmag.com.” Previously, the preview card would have included that image but also the headline and a snippet of the story’s text, which made it obvious you were looking at a shared link and not an attached photo. 

The move, which Elon Musk argued in August would "greatly improve the [a]esthetics" of X, both strips possibly crucial context from posts and opens the door to pranks and outright misinformation.

Chris Combs, an aerospace-engineering professor who has been critical of Musk’s oversight of SpaceX’s giant Starship rocket, demonstrated that risk with a post Thursday, pictured above, in which he wrote “BREAKING Elon Musk announces cancellation of the SpaceX Starship program." That appeared above a link to a Fortune story—previewed only by a stock photo of Musk stamped “fortune.com"—that in reality covered the headline-removal move.

This change, which first surfaced only in some clients Wednesday and has since flipped back and forth at least once, also appears to be retroactive to a large degree. Scrolling through PCMag’s profile on X reveals that all recent link previews have been stripped of headlines, although posts from 2021 retain previews headlines and text but not images. 

Ads, however, appear to be exempt from this policy. So do links to some smaller sites; for example, a post last