Elon Musk strips news headlines from X, posing challenge for media outlets.

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("X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites, including news articles, the latest change introduced by owner Elon Musk as he seeks to remold the social media company and reduce traffic to other sites.")

X, the site formerly known as Twitter, has removed automatically generated headlines from links to external websites, including news articles, the latest change introduced by owner Elon Musk as he seeks to remold the social media company and reduce traffic to other sites.

Under the new format, posts linking to third-party news stories or websites automatically load those articles’ lead images in preview tiles along with their web domains — but with no headlines, depriving readers of key context from the publishers about their articles, according to a review by The Washington Post on Thursday. The change also appeared to affect shared links to non-news websites, although it did not affect paid advertisements, which still loaded with headlines, The Post’s review found.

X did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Thursday.

The change comes amid a wider push by X to discourage users from clicking on external links, including links leading to news sites. “Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Musk said in a tweet Tuesday.

In response to earlier reports that X was testing the removal of headlines from article previews, Musk said that the revised format should be considered an aesthetic improvement. “This is coming from me directly,” he tweeted in August.

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Journalism professor Karin Wahl-Jorgensen at Cardiff University was skeptical about Musk’s claim that the change was driven by aesthetic considerations. She said that the new format could be part of a broader attempt by Musk to undermine news organizations’ reach on the social media platform.

"Although Elon Musk has framed this as a decision informed by aesthetic considerations, it can be seen as part of a larger trend toward making Twitter/X more difficult for news organizations to use,” she wrote in an email Thursday. “It is likely to have a significant adverse impact on click-through rates, because platform users will no longer have the necessary context to understand the content of links — and therefore little reason to click on them.”