Elon Musk updates X's terms of service to get you to stop calling it Twitter

It was back in July that Twitter owner Elon Musk killed Larry the Bird and the platform informally referred to as “the bird app” rebranded to simply ‘X’, and while many users are still refusing to switch from ‘tweet’ to the more generic ‘post’, updates to X’s Terms of Service (ToS) at the end of September will only put more pressure on accounts to make the change.

While users will have already seen tweaks to terminology while accessing the app (‘tweet’ to ‘post’, ‘retweet’ to ‘repost’ and so on), the ToS – which every account has to agree to in order to access Twitter/X - is the latest part of the company to undergo amendments to bring it in line with Musk’s vision.

In one section of the current ToS, introduced in June 2022 (several months before the Tesla founder bought out Twitter in October that year), it reads: “You agree that this license includes the right for Twitter to provide, promote, and improve the Services and to make Content submitted to or through the Services available to other companies, organizations or individuals for the syndication, broadcast, distribution, Retweet, promotion or publication of such Content on other media and services, subject to our terms and conditions for such Content use.”

The key word here being “retweet”, which has been scrubbed from the newest ToS taking effect from 29 September and replaced with “repost”.

Yet despite Musk being keen to bury the lingo and brand he inherited last year, there’s still a few places where Twitter is still in use, with the new ToS still linking to several webpages either containing the old name in its URL, or the name of the page.

Oops.

And it seems X users still don’t care about referring to the site as Twitter, as much as Musk and co. may encourage us to stop doing so:

At least you tried, hey, Elon?

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