The original @America user was a critic of both Musk and Trump.
X owner Elon Musk has once again hijacked a rare coveted username from its original user.
This time, however, the takeover wasn’t for the good of X the company, it was so Musk could promote Donald Trump for president.
On Saturday, Musk appeared at Donald Trump’s rally in Butler Pennsylvania. However, earlier that day, Musk began promoting his pro-Trump Super PAC, called America PAC, using a brand new handle @America.
“Read @America to understand why I’m supporting Trump for President,” Musk’s new bio said as of approximately 1:30pm ET on Saturday, Oct. 5.
The @America handle appeared attached to a brand new account setup just this month, in October 2024. However, this rare, one-word geographic handle had already been long registered by another X user more than 14 years prior to Musk taking the handle from them, in September 2010.
According to a person familiar with the situation, X took the handle from the user much like how Musk’s social media company took the @X handle from its original registrant last year.
I’m not interested in what a drug-addled white supremacist has to say. I’m not allowed to use edibles on my days off because it can put my job but at risk but this piece-of-shit uses ketamine, acid, shrooms and cocaine and is still allowed to have expensive government contracts.
If you're still on Xitter at this point, you deserve all the bullshit you get. That place is a cesspool. You can't swim in the toilet and then pretend to be mad you're covered in shit.
After this, I don't know what more proof anyone could possibly need that Xitter is purely a right-wing propaganda platform exactly equivalent to the likes of Truth [sic] Social. Anyone who continues to use Xitter supports this behavior. Continued use of accounts like @POTUS or @KamalaHarris or these is effectively an endorsement of equating Donald Trump with America. It has to stop! The platform has to be fully abandoned by every single person, organization, or government entity that isn't fascist; there is no choice now.
See you don't get it, it's totally fine for musk to take the @America tag and push Twitter for Trump. Twitter was SUPER biased before because you couldn't say the N-word whenever you want. It's not biased at all now because it's completely far right which is obviously the Correct Way to Be™ so it can't be biased.
Sure it sucks, but it can't be a surprise anymore.
The username @X was also taken from a user. Same with @Music, who if I recall correctly, was a fan of Musk and was even subscribing to Twitter at the time. They even continued to do what @Music was doing with music recommendations, so it was barely a rebrand. It was basically just hijacking the work someone else put into establishing their social media presence.
I can't believe I'm saying this, but... this isn't quite as bad as it looks.
although clearly they could have handled the situation better.
Agreed, but I mean has been the general theme with the new owner. Everything could have been handled better, but nothing was.
Users do not technically own their handles on X.
Another reason why the fediverse is better. We have better control over this, simply by owning our own instances. Then admins on another instance can't simply seize our usernames.
It appears the original owner hasn’t posted on X since it was called Twitter, in May 2020.
So basically they released a handle that otherwise wasn't going to be used and would have gone to waste.
It would be better if they had a general policy about these things .. but considering the owner...
as it pertains to the @X handle, the company had a good case that they should have ownership of it
Less good as the user was actively using it beforehand but the justification is also stronger in this case.
I'm all for hating on musk/trump. But do we know if he actually stole the handle/tag or if he paid an obscene amount of money to the original owner?
I hate Twitter and deleted my account a long time ago but facts matter and assuming he stole the tag is just as bad as what he is doing. We may never know what actually happened but I'm curious