A couple of days ago, Twitter removed headlines from embedded links to other websites. Today, the other shoe dropped: advertisements with the same design, making them look very similar to news stories and other links. You can’t report, block, like or retweet them, and there’s no disclosure or other indication that it’s an ad.
X, the Elon Musk-owned platform formerly known as Twitter, has begun serving its users with a weird new ad format and it’s one of the company’s least transparent products yet.
The rollout of these ads also provides the public with a hint regarding just how much the company is struggling to attract advertisers.
Multiple X users have reached out to Mashable over the past few days to report seeing a new type of ad in their For You feed that they had not previously come across on the platform. These new X ads don’t allow users to like or retweet the ad posts. In fact, the new ad format also doesn’t disclose who is behind the ad or that it is even an advertisement at all.
The ads are chumbox-tier, too, so it’s hardly the one weird trick to win back the Fortune 100 spenders scared off by all the Nazis. It’s a desperate scrabbling for revenue, like everyone else in web publishing land.
If you’re sat there shitfaced, sailing on K, typing stupid shit like “nothing is true, everything is permitted” into the box over and over again, knowing that you’re probably going to end up Prigozhined by someone who gave you money—c’est la vie.
