The year of social media soul-searching: Twitter dies, X and Threads are born and AI gets personal

tech.hindustantimes.com:

We lost Twitter and got X. We tried out Bluesky and Mastodon (well, some of us did). We fretted about AI bots and teen mental health. We cocooned in private chats and scrolled endlessly as we did in years past. For social media users, 2023 was a year of beginnings and endings, with some soul-searching in between.

Here's a look back some of the biggest stories in social media in 2023 — and what to watch for next year:

A little more than a year ago, Elon Musk walked into Twitter 's San Francisco headquarters, fired its CEO and other top executives and began transforming the social media platform into what's now known as X.

Musk revealed the X logo in July. It quickly replaced Twitter's name and its whimsical blue bird icon, online and on the company's San Francisco headquarters.

"And soon we shall bid adieu to the twitter brand and, gradually, all the birds,” Musk posted on the site.

Because of its public nature and because it attracted public figures, journalists and other high-profile users, Twitter always had an outsized influence on popular culture — but that influence seems to be waning.

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“It had a lot of problems even before Musk took it over, but it was beloved brand with a clear role in the social media landscape,” said Jasmine Enberg, a social media analyst at Insider Intelligence. “There are still moments of Twitter magic on the platform, like when journalists took the platform to post real-time updates about the OpenAI drama, and the smaller communities on the platform remain important to many users. But the Twitter of the past 17 years is largely gone, and X's reason for existence is murky.”

Since Musk's takeover, X has been bombarded by allegations of misinformation and racism,