Twitter removes source labels Twitter Owner and now the world’s second richest person Elon Musk on Sunday, December 18, 2022, at 10:35 AM IST confirmed that Twitter will remove the source labels from the tweets.

Source label is a unique feature of Twitter that let the users know how the tweet has been published. The Source Label shows whether a tweet has been posted with an Android phone through ‘Twitter for Android’, with iPhone through ‘Twitter for iPhone, or with a browser through ‘Twitter for Web’.

If a tweet has been posted through a third-party source, usually a marketing service custom si, Twitter Source labels are useful as they let the users know about the source and the authority of the Tweet.

The feature is sometimes useful as it helps the readers to decide whether to trust the information provided in a tweet or not by just searching about the source.

Sometimes the feature makes life difficult. For example, people with lots of followers regularly receive offers for paid promotion, let’s say a person accepted an offer to promote an Android phone through his Twitter handle. This is where the problem comes in. Most famous people use an iPhone. If he promotes an Android phone through his iPhone, he would receive a lot of criticism for doing so.

This happened with Gal Gadot, DC’s wonder woman when she tweeted a video promoting a chinese android phone, Huawei. Youtuber Marques Brownlee was one of the first to point that and criticised the actress which was the reason for getting him blocked by the actress.

Marques Brownlee crticising Gal Gadot

Similarly, if an android phone manufacturing company promotes their products through Twitter with an iPhone, that would be catastrophic.

Elon Musk on November 14 said “And we will finally stop adding what device a tweet was written on (waste of screen space & compute) below every tweet. No one even knows why we did that”

Source labels were indeed a waste of screen space and computing but that is the unique feature which only Twitter have. Now no one can share any more iconic ‘iPhone tweets’ memes.

See this tweet which was posted through LG Smart Fridge. Tweet with source label LG Smart Fridge

But we can’t do anything, the changes to the platform are visible almost after the confirmation from Twitter Chief.

Recently, Twitter owner rolled out new features. If you open the Twitter notice carefully, you can now see the tweet’s impression on the left.

If Elon Musk does something, that doesn’t become a topic of fun. Twitter users started pointing out popular brands which have millions of followers but the impression on their tweets is just a few thousand.