World reacts to Twitter’s new X logo

Elon Musk’s controversial decision to rebrand Twitter has been hit with backlash as eagle-eyed readers spot an eerie coincidence.

The world is reacting to Elon Musk’s decision to rebrand Twitter by replacing the famous blue bird logo with an X.

Workers were seen pulling down the “Twitter” sign at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco. Inside the building, rooms are being renamed with names including the letter X such as eXposure, eXult and s3Xy, the New York Times reports.

It’s the culmination of Musk’s obsession with the twenty-fourth letter of the alphabet that started in 1999 when he founded X.com, the precursor to PayPal.

The X.com domain now redirects to Twitter. Earlier this year it emerged that Twitter’s parent company had been renamed X Corporation.

The shift to the new logo started overnight: the website now displays an X but the mobile app still has the familiar blue bird... for now.

Just biked past Twitter HQ on way home, goodbye to the @Twitter sign? pic.twitter.com/Dt4RiRPIDR

— Taylor Tabb (@taytabb) July 24, 2023

Twitter launched its new logo on July 24, 2023, replacing the blue bird with a white X on a black background as the Elon Musk-owned company moves toward rebranding as X. Picture: AFP

The new logo displayed on Twitter's headquarters.

It’s reportedly part of Musk’s plan to make Twitter an “everything app” which would function as a social media platform and also offer messaging and payments.

The reaction to Musk’s change was mixed to say the least.

One user called it a “terrible decision” and others mourned the death of the little blue bird that inspired the verb “tweet”.

Under the site’s new identity, a post will be called “an X”, Musk confirmed.

Another said they disliked the new colour scheme: “My mood changed from blue to black. Blue was still better.”

And it didn’t take long for users to spot that similarity between the new logo and the X in the font Special Alphabets 4.

“The new X logo is literally the X glyph from Special Alphabets 4,” wrote Verge editor Tom Warren wrote.

There was also a cheeky jab from the founder of Twitter.

Martin Grasser, one of the original designers of the blue bird logo, wrote that it was intended to be “simple, balanced, and legible at very small sizes.” Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, who signed off on the design in 2012, replied to Grasser with an emoji of a goat, meaning “greatest of all time”.

Just like the South Park episode “Simpsons Already Did It”, which pokes fun at how the show has covered almost every conceivable plot, Matt Groening’s show may have indeed predicted the change long before it happened.

The image appeared in Season 23 of The Simpsons in an episode titled Ned 'N Edna's Blend.

In 2012, The Simpsons episode “Ned ‘n’ Edna’s Blend Agenda” aired, with the plot centred on Ned Flanders’s secret marriage to Edna Krabappel.

During once scene, Homer’s phone is shown with an app that looks suspiciously like the new X logo.

However, it’s not exactly the same, and there are some photoshopped versions bouncing around the internet, as fact-checker Snopes points out.

The show has famously predicted a number of events including the coronavirus pandemic and Donald Trump’s announcement that he would run for president in 2024.

‘Brand suicide’

Esther Crawford, a former head of product at Twitter, said the change amounted to a form of “corporate seppuku,” referring to the Japanese ritual suicide for samurais.

Such a move was “usually committed by new management in pursuit of cost-savings due to a lack of understanding about the core business or disregard for the customer experience,” she added.

Vanitha Swaminathan, professor of marketing at the University of Pittsburgh, warned that there was a real risk of further damage against the company.

“Every time there is a name change, customers generally don’t like change of any kind,” she said.

“But in this case, if they really want to move in a different direction, or they want to lose some of the negative PR, this is a good way to give yourself a new start,” she added.

- with AFP