X is still “formerly known as Twitter”

It turns out X doesn’t mark the spot. More than a year after Elon Musk tried to slap a new label on the platform, media outlets are working overtime to remind us that X isn't just a typo.

There are many reasons that X hasn’t caught on. The letter already had deep associations with things that weren’t social media platforms like Gen X, Malcolm X, X-ray. Plus, besides the logo and the flight of users, the platform was largely unchanged.

However, X may be turning a corner. In 2023, nearly every article included “formerly known as Twitter.” But in the last few months, that amount has fallen to a quarter. Will 2024 bee the year that X is once and for all “formerly known as Twitter”?

Methodology

I used the New York Times Article Search API to search for articles mentioning “X” or “X, formerly known as Twitter” between July 23 2023 and August 18, 2024. The “X” keyword returns a lot of hits that have nothing to do with Musk’s social media platform like “Malcolm X, “X-ray” or the NYT author “Brian X. Chen” so I filtered those from the search.

I’ve excluded results from the podcast, video, newsletter and corrections sections.

Next, I checked every result to confirm whether it referred to X alone or some version of “X, formerly known as Twitter” in the body of the article. An article was tagged as belonging to “X, formerly known as Twitter” bucket when the tagline was used to clarify mentions of X. I did not include examples of articles that use the qualifier when referring to events that occurred when X was still named Twitter because that is essential to the facts of the story rather than used to reduce confusion.