In 2023 the social media platform Twitter changed its name to X. What does this change mean for citations?
When you cite a post published on X, give the name of the platform in the Title of Container element. (For an overview of citing social media in MLA style, see our previous post).
O’Connor, Kim. “Kelly Link on ‘nighttime logic.’” X, 13 Feb. 2024, twitter.com/shallowbrigade/status/1757476492647219227.
At the time of this writing, the domain “twitter.com” is still in use, as shown in the URL in the example above. If you include a URL in your entry, copy it exactly as it’s given on the platform.
But what if you’re citing posts that were published on the site when it was still called Twitter? Or you’re citing a mix of posts published before and after the name change? Because posts published formerly on Twitter now exist on X, we recommend using X as the title of container for any posts published on the platform, past and present.
Klein, Ezra. “My phone keeps autocorrecting ‘I’ to ‘AI’ which is a little on-the-nose.” X, 22 Apr. 2022, twitter.com/ezraklein/status/1517591690101489665.
With the name change came other changes as well: what used to be called tweets are now called posts. To be up-to-date, avoid referring to “tweets” and the corresponding verb form (“so-and-so tweeted”) in your prose.
In a wry post, Ezra Klein wrote that his phone was “autocorrecting ‘I’ to ‘AI’ which is a little on-the-nose” (Klein).