Elon Musk introduced the elimination of hashtags from commercials on his social media platform, X, calling them an aesthetic nightmare.
Elon Musk acquired social media platform Twitter and renamed it to X.(AFP)
“Starting tomorrow, the aesthetic nightmare that is hashtags will be banned from ads on X,” he wrote in a submit.
Check out his submit right here:
Many customers have been left confused by the submit, however it doesn’t seem that the ban applies to hashtags on regular posts on X. However, Musk has lengthy criticised using hashtags on his social media platform and urged customers to not use them.
In 2024, Musk overtly labelled hashtags ugly and requested individuals to cease utilizing them, because the algorithm not wanted them.
“Please cease utilizing hashtags. The system does not want them anymore they usually look ugly,” he had mentioned.
He had defined that with the growing use of AI instruments on the platform, the necessity for conventional hashtags not existed. Musk claimed that X’s discovery and search algorithm utilised the AI chatbot Grok, which was capable of group topics while not having the assistance of hashtags.
This marks one other large change dropped at X, previously Twitter, after Musk acquired the favored website in late 2022. Hashtags have been an important a part of Twitter since 2007, typically used to group tendencies or conversations.
X customers react
The submit confused many customers however was welcomed by others who agreed with Musk and referred to as hashtags visually unappealing now that they’re irrelevant to the algorithm.
“Hashtags in adverts have been the Comic Sans of social media. Glad even Elon Musk couldn’t ignore the visible air pollution anymore,” mentioned one person.
Another added, “Hashtags don’t work. I don’t know why many individuals nonetheless use them.”
Meanwhile, some customers referred to as for different points to be mounted as a substitute of “aesthetic” corrections.
“It’s not a nightmare. They’re simply wonderful. You’re overplaying it. Fix account-level shadow bans as a substitute,” mentioned considered one of them.








