In early April 2023, a number of Twitter users commented that, under Elon Musk's leadership, Twitter had changed its name to "Titter."
Some, like the below-displayed Twitter user, shared what they captioned as a "new logo" for the social media company under the new name. The graphic showed Twitter's bird logo with cartoonish breasts.
(Image via @TaraBull808 on Twitter)
The rumors followed a series of tweets in which Musk referred to the company as "Titter," and images of a sign outside of its headquarters in San Francisco that showed the letter "w" in "Twitter" covered up.
"Our landlord at SF HQ says we're legally required to keep sign as Twitter & cannot remove 'w', so we painted it background color. Problem solved!" Musk tweeted on April 10. "They tried to muffle our titter."
Those messages led to people wondering if he had really changed the actual name and/or logo of the company.
Apart from the sign outside of the San Francisco office, Snopes did not find any evidence that Twitter had officially changed its name or logo, as of April 10, 2023. There were no announcements from the company about the alleged change, nor any indication from a user's standpoint on the platform that it had a new name. "Twitter" remained listed in several places on the website, such as the search bar and URL.
For those reasons, we rate the claim that Twitter had adopted the new name "Titter" as "False."
When we asked Twitter's communications team why the CEO was using the name "Titter," we got a poop emoji autoreply. (Musk instituted that autoreply to all questions from journalists on March 19.)
(via Elon Musk Twitter)
Amid the "titter" campaign, Musk changed his name on the platform to "Harry Bolz," in an apparent promotion of cryptocurrency.
A number of news stories saw the moves by Musk as jokes. A Forbes piece noted that Musk had floated the idea of renaming Twitter to "Titter" before he became CEO, in April 2022, when he was a member of the company's board. Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion six months later.
In October 2021, Musk tweeted that he was thinking about "starting [a] new university: Texas Institute of Technology & Science," which, when would form the acronym "TITS." When a Twitter user suggested that the name be "Texas Institute of Science & Technology" instead, Musk responded: "Nope, T is def first."