Hank Green clarifies why he still calls X 'Twitter'

When you see articles about X (Formerly Twitter) on Vlogger Beat and other websites, you will often see it reffered to exactly as that -- X (Formerly Twitter). There's a reason for that. Stylistically, journalists are expected to refer to it this way, and most of us do it begrudgingly.

Hank Green recently released a YouTube video that puts what many of us are often thinking into words. He doesn't agree that Twitter should be referred to as X. But he actually gives a few solid arguments explaining why that is -- and it's making a lot of people think about social spaces, even virtual ones, and who really "owns" them.

You can watch the video for full context (and honestly for a really great metaphor to support his main argument). But the main point is this: The app formerly called Twitter may be owned by a company called X. But X does not "own" Twitter. A company has never "owned" Twitter in the way the people who use it own it.

Twitter is a social media app. A virtual social space in which thousands upon thousands of people regularly gather to share thoughts, start conversations, and make connections (meaningful or otherwise). Green's argument is that because it's the people using Twitter every day who essentially keep it running, they should get to decide what it's called.

This may be a very small thing in the larger scale of the universe, but Twitter is a platform that has meant a lot to a lot of people over the years. There are people who have launched careers because of Twitter, who formed lifelong friendships or even romantic partnerships because of Twitter. Twitter changing doesn't change the meaningful things we have gathered from it. But Twitter matters to many, and to see it shift in such a drastic and displeasing way is jarring to many who have been using it for years.

So when we call it Twitter, it's our way of acknowledging that this place holds genuine meaning for us. Or it did once, when it was a better version of what it has since become.