Twitter has been in the news a lot recently, thanks to Elon Musk, who believes the platform is more alive than ever. Musk suddenly announced the removal of Tweet source labels in a recent tweet.
The threat was issued on Monday, with Musk apologizing for Twitter’s slow performance in many countries. He claims that the app makes too many Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) and that the extra “microservices” slow things down.
Besides that, Musk stated that the “Twitter for iPhone” label found at the bottom of each tweet was being removed, calling it a “waste of screen space.” He goes on to say that he and the Twitter team don’t understand why it’s necessary, and he plans to stop including it in tweets, though he hasn’t specified when this will happen.
The Twitter help center, on the other hand, clearly explains the purpose of Tweet source labels.
“Tweet source labels help you better understand how a Tweet was posted. This additional information provides context about the Tweet and its author. If you don’t recognize the source, you may want to learn more to determine how much you trust the content.”
However, there were several instances where people or accounts were ridiculed for the device from which they were tweeting. “Twitter for iPhone” and “Twitter for Android” are two popular labels that frequently cause controversy.
Apart from the previously stated ridicule, the tweet source labels aren’t all bad. This is due to the presence of several other labels. “Twitter for the web” and “Twitter for Advertisers” are two examples. The latter label, for example, suggests that the posted tweet was created using a Twitter Ads Composer. Similarly, we frequently see ‘Promoted’ labels, which indicate that it is being promoted by advertisers.
Aside from these, some users, whether on Android or iPhone, frequently use a third-party Twitter client, which is reflected in the source label category.
