“Does anyone know who owns xvideos?”
Xtreme Disaster
Twitter’s disastrous “X” name change strikes again.
Last week, for whatever reason, Twitter owner and noted t-shirt wearer Elon Musk decided it was high time for Twitter to go through a massive rebrand. To be fair, the change was somewhat inevitable; as Insider recently noted, Musk has been wanting to own a website called X since his PayPal days, and has talked about turning Twitter into a WeChat-like “everything app” since he took over the company last year. But regardless of inevitably, rebrands are no small thing — and if someone were to rename, say, the globally recognized site they purchased for a cool $44 billion just last year, you’d probably expect them to summon up some shred of attention to detail.
Twitter’s rebrand, though, has been all kinds of careless. And now, in-between ill-advised signage, multiple apparent trademark issues, at least one police visit, and piecemealed infrastructure weirdness, X-formerly-Twitter seems to have forgotten to tie up yet another loose end: ensuring that Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino’s former handle was locked away from pesky trolls.
Amid the X launch, Yaccarino, who formerly went by @lindayaccs on the social media site, changed her handle to @lindayaX. Clever! But in the shuffle, it seems that no one at the company thought it might be a good idea to make her former username unavailable. Unsurprisingly, as caught by Gizmodo, a troll swooped in almost immediately to take Yaccarino’s old handle and transform it into a parody account.
XVideos
The troll wasted no time in tweeting — if we still call it that — things like “hello fellow Reptilians!” and asking followers if X should revert back to Twitter. The profile also links to the porn website xvideos.com, presumably a nod to the fact that Twitter’s new name and logo definitely look like they belong to an NSFW content provider.
But as Gizmodo notes, it doesn’t look like the account is breaking any rules. The site allows parody profiles as long as they’re explicitly marked as such; this one is clearly denoted as parody in the username. That said, though, X/Twitter has certainly taken a “rules, shmules” approach to handle ownership lately. If Yaccarino decides she wants her old account name back, we’re sure she also retains the ability to snap it up without paying the proud new owner.
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