Update January 3rd, 12:35PM ET: X has reverted this change on the web, so it seems the full headlines aren’t rolling out widely just yet. Our original article follows.
X once again adds headlines to article links — but with tiny text
It’s an improvement, but there are still some quirks.
Jay Peters is a news editor covering technology, gaming, and more. He joined The Verge in 2019 after nearly two years at Techmeme.
After removing headlines from URL cards on X (formerly Twitter), the platform is adding them back — but they don’t work quite the same as before. Some of us at The Verge are seeing on the web that headlines and website title pages are now appearing over the images that link to those pages, which makes it a lot easier to know what you’re clicking on.
This is a nice change, but there are still some quirks. For example, if a headline or title is too long, it gets cut off with an ellipsis, and the text is pretty small. But it’s an improvement from how things used to work, where the images would just include the domain of the website it linked out to.
X stopped showing headlines last year because owner Elon Musk thought it would make posts look better. Removing headlines did make posts smaller, but it was harder to know where a linked image would take you when you clicked on it, meaning people had to make workarounds like adding a headline directly to an image or including the headline in the text of a post.
Musk promised in November that headlines would reappear over URL cards in an “upcoming release,” and it seems that change is starting to roll out. I’m not seeing it on the iOS app yet, but I’m guessing it will show up eventually. On Android, headlines still work like they used to before all of these changes — they still appear under an image — so it’s less clear if or when this change might roll out there.
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