brands: has twitter's name change been accepted?

It's approaching 24 months since Elon Musk took the decision to rename 'Twitter' to 'X' and replace the iconic blue bird icon with a monotone white X on a black background.

I cannot help but wonder if this sudden rebrand has been accepted by the general public and by its users alike, I was hesistant to go looking for an answer too early on, as we, as humans don't like change and tend to stick to old habits, but with the 2 year anniversarry approaching, I thought it might be time to have a look into it now that everything has settled down (seemingly).

Polls

The results are in, and... the opinions are divided.

Source of poll and other statistics can be found here

Seems like even inside its parent country, a majority have essentially disregarded this rebrand, still calling it 'Twitter' as of 2025 and an even higher number of people within the UK have decided that 'Twitter' is the preferred term. I'm personally guilty of this, force of habit as well as "X" just doesn't sound right, Twitter is the way to go, it has been for most of my life and it isn't about to change now.

Financial impact

So seeing as the rebrand hasnt exactly stuck or gone well with the public, how is this affecting the financial side of things?

Not great, and with worse to come it seems. This can be only partly blamed on the rebrand, a lot of politics are also at play here, with X esentially become more and more unwelcoming to certain groups and leaning towards a more conservative, right-wing hub with likeminded people which has also not been very stern on extremist content and outright offensive content being hosted on their platform, which drove advertisers away and caused a major drop financially.

It did not help that the rebrand drove a lot of the old users away, and more of the right-wing, political people onto the platform.

So, was the rebrand a good idea?

I do not think so; the polls and statistics essentially back my opinion up. I myself deleted my account, not essentially due to the rebrand but I simply did not agree with some of the changes that came under the new CEO and decided the platform is not right for me anymor,e seeing it going the way it is going.

A sudden rebrand like the one Musk did is suicide, it was not received well by the active users of the app, with many appealing to Musk to do a U-Turn but all those pleas went unheard, and one thing you should not do if you want to keep your platform and brand alive is go around angering your active and dedicated userbase, which now reflects in the dropping numbers as many have left.

Replacing the iconic and globally known blue bird for a letter, replacing the name of the app that became a verb in everyday vocabulary for some ("I'm going to tweet that") with a letter. Awful, basically lighting the match that was to set your company up in flames.

So finally, I'd say this is a major branding DON'T, and others should learn from it.