: Don't overplay it
Because of our fucked up little world, it is very important to refer to Twitter/X by the correct name, where “the correct name” means “the name that aligns with the political beliefs you are trying to signal.” I would be more upset about this if not for the fact that speech was already full of a zillion tiny political signals, such as “youths” and “spendy,” that you have to manage if you want to reassure the listener that you are on the same team.
Still, I find it kind of gauche when people overplay the “I’m still calling it Twitter” thing. I still see a lot of posts that say “So-and-so posted a statement on Twitter—hey fUCK yOU Elon, I’ll call it Twitter if I want to—” which kind of undermine themselves by still fixating on the matter after all these years. The “fuck you” would be subtler, and therefore more effective, if you just called it Twitter in passing without making a big show of it.
After all, a big controversy is exactly what Elon wants—Streisand effect; this is discourse basics. There is a video somewhere of an interview with Elon where even he slips up and refers a few times to “tweets” instead of “posts.” He doesn’t actually prefer the name X, he just wanted to change the name as a weird dominance fetish thing—because let’s be honest, it is kind of funny that major newspapers still have to write “X (formerly known as Twitter).” Meta and Alphabet graduated from the parentheses treatment far more quickly after their respective rebrands, partly because the rebrands (while still bad) were not quite as bad as Twitter→X (like, the letter…?), but also because Elon Musk is a troll and journalists cannot resist feeding him.