See the picture, guess the story – Elon Musk wants changes to X.

The world’s richest man Elon Musk wants changes to his social media platform. They  could blunt efforts by news publishers to build audiences online.  

Remove the headline and text.

Musk – worth more than £239 billion is pushing for his X platform, formerly Twitter,  to remove the headline and text from links to stories shared, Fortune magazine reported.

The move will merely allow a picture to be displayed on the post. Many journalists use X for news monitoring. 

Move down to a push for subscriptions.

This is likely an attempt by Musk to get users to spend more time on X. He hopes users will  opt for the subscription service for more details.

It is not immediately clear how the move will impact advertisers on the platform that Musk claimed, in July, had 540 million monthly users.

Draw for X premium service.

Currently news links come up on the timeline of users as “cards” along with an image, source address and an abridged headline. Such packaging helps draw clicks and helps publishers gain readers.

But with the shortened links, users might end up writing some text along with their posts and eventually they could consider X’s premium service that allows a single post of up to 25,000 characters, Reuters reported.

With the changes, Musk is pitching X as a more relevant platform for content creators. Premium subscribers can now post longer videos. Their posts are shown higher up and they also receive a cut of ad sales.