X owner Elon Musk has made it no secret that Twitter, the former name of the social media company he bought for $44 billion in 2022, is no longer in existence. He sold the company’s famous Blue Bird memorabilia, removed the word “tweet” from the platform, and is now apparently trying to change all references to Twitter.com to X.com without consulting users.
The change was first reported by Mashablewho discovered Posts from upset And concerned users about the change to X. A few days ago, some users noticed that X was automatically changing mentions of the Twitter.com URL to X.com in the social network’s iOS app. The change was made regardless of where “Twitter” was in the URL, meaning URLs like “NetfliTwitter.com” appeared as “Netflix.com” in posts.
However, as you can imagine, even when
While at first glance this may simply seem like an annoying change from the company, users were quick to point out that the situation created an ideal situation for scammers. By buying up domains like NetfliTwitter.com, fraudsters were given a perfect opportunity to run phishing campaigns and steal users’ login credentials.
The X user @yuyu0127_preemptively purchased the NetfliTwitter.com domain to prevent it from being used by hackers and posted the following warning:
“Starting April 8, 2024, the iOS Twitter client (now X) will automatically replace the text “twitter.com” in posts with “x.com” as part of its functionality. Therefore, for example, a URL that appears to be “netflix.com” will actually redirect to “netflitwitter.com” when clicked.
Please note that this feature may be exploited in the future by purchasing domains containing “twitter.com” to direct users to malicious sites.
This domain, “netflitwitter.com”, was purchased for protection purposes to prevent its use for such malicious activities.
Mashable noted that another X user, @amasato_mochi, bought the domain “seTwitter.com,” which X changed to “sex.com.” The user’s goal was also to protect the unsuspecting public from phishing attacks. The domain “seTwitter.com” currently redirects to another page with a similar warning to @yuyu0127_.
“Please do not access suspicious URLs!” @amasato_mochi wrote. “On April 8, 2024, a dangerous feature was implemented in the iOS client for Twitter (now X) that forcibly replaces the string twitter.com with x.com in tweet content if it is included. “As a result, there could be an increase in people purchasing domains that contain “any string” twitter.com and, depending on the purchasers’ intentions, this could result in malicious websites being linked to.”
On Tuesday, it appeared that X had reversed course and no longer automatically changed “NetfliTwitter.com” to “Netflix.com” on iOS. However, Mashable noted that there were still many cases where other references to words were changed to resemble authentic websites, without providing specific examples.
Gizmodo contacted X on Wednesday morning for comment on the change but did not immediately receive a response.