Elon Musk to Strip Headlines From News Articles on Twitter: ‘Will Greatly Improve the Esthetics’

zz/Wil R/STAR MAX/IPx 2020 via AP

Twitter owner Elon Musk confirmed on Monday evening that his social network would soon strip the headlines and descriptions from links to articles, leaving only the photo.

Fortune reported on Monday that Twitter — now known simply as X — would soon change its link-sharing infrastructure so that users “would need to manually add their own text alongside the links they share on the service; otherwise the tweet will display only an image with no context.”

An unnamed source told Fortune that the change was an attempt to squeeze more posts onto a user’s screen and that Musk believed the measure would help combat clickbait news articles by removing headlines entirely.

Musk confirmed the report in a post on his social network hours later and claimed, “This is coming from me directly. Will greatly improve the esthetics.”

Several Twitter users pointed out that the change would make it almost impossible to know the destination of links shared on the platform, unless explicitly specified by the user sharing, and could embolden scammers and abuse.

Since his acquisition of Twitter last year, Musk has made many controversial changes to the platform, including rebranding the social network from Twitter to ‘X’, ditching the platform’s iconic bird logo, and turning verification into a paid feature for premium subscribers.

Last week, Musk also announced that Twitter’s block button would soon be deleted, despite his own use of the feature against critics.