Report by Yashasvi Anika Tandon
Twitter, the worldwide social media platform made a new amendment (a change or modification).
On Monday 24th July, 2023, the company changed its logo from the Bluebird to the black and white letter ‘X’.
The owner of Twitter, Elon Musk’s reason for changing Twitter’s logo was to express and include the imperfections that made them unique.
The Twitter headquarters were also lit up by a huge X.
In October 2022, Elon Musk had announced that he would work towards making Twitter an ‘X’. His rocket company SpaceX also has the letter ‘X’ in it. X.com, which is now known as PayPal also had the letter ‘X’ formerly.
The Logo X
There are other sites that also use the letter X, including Microsoft Xbox and Meta. They have intellectual property rights (a copyright or trademark to one’s own creations, inventions, literature, artistry, designs, names, symbols, and images) to the letter X. There are 900 active trademark registrations in the USA that use the letter X. This can cause confusion in the minds of customers.
History of the Twitter logo
Twitter was founded on 21st March, 2006. The logos since then have been:
2006 – 2010: They used the lower-case word ‘Twitter’ in green and then light blue colour.
2010 – 2012: In 2010 it was modified to the same ‘twitter’, but with a small blue bird to its right.
2012 – 2023: The company switched to the Bluebird that we’re all aware of.
July 2023: Elon Musk changed the logo to ‘X’.
Changes in Twitter since it was bought by Elon Musk for $44 billion in November 2022
- Earlier, verification was done by Twitter’s editorial team. Now, ‘verification’ means that the member is a paying subscriber.
- Reinstatement (giving back a person a position they have lost) of accounts.
- For blue users (people who can get access to more privileges on the app after paying) a, 2 factor authentication (a security system that requires 2 distinct forms of authentication) was implemented so that their accounts cannot be hacked easily.
- The users can be charged by publishers. This means that people who create content on Twitter can now get paid for creating that content. Twitter has currently made it free for all creators (provided they are paid subscribers, aka verified users), but will, in time, take a cut of the revenue.
- Ban on any account that is linked to any social media competitor of Twitter. Recently, Meta (the company that runs Facebook and Instagram) launched a service called Threads, that was similar to Twitter. Thread urls could not be accessed through Twitter.
Question For You
Which logo do you like more? Why?
Image Credit: https://blog.logomyway.com/twitter-logo/ for earlier Twitter logos. Featured image and current logo from the Twitter website