Twitter, a social media platform that was recently relaunched as X, has taken the name @music from an open-source software engineer who told CNBC that he started the account in 2007 and had amassed a following of roughly 500,000 people.
Jeremy Vaught was forced to give up the desired username on the X platform, but he was given the chance to select from a list of other handles associated with music instead. He does not like his @musicfan X-assigned account, but he is content with it for the time being. At least X transferred his followers to the new account, he claimed.
The social media company’s action calls into question the value of a handle on its platform. The most recent version of the X terms of service state that “We can additionally remove or refuse to provide any Content on the Services, limiting distribution or visibility of any Contents on the Service, suspend or terminate users, even reclaim usernames without liability to you.”
Creators may find it challenging to put their long-term projects on the platform out of fear of losing their handles, according to Vaught.
Despite not making money off of his @music account, Vaught occasionally used it to review consumer electronics, typically for companies who made headphones, earbuds, and other accessories, and asked for his opinion.
Vaught had feared that the previous Twitter management might attempt to take control of his handle. However, Twitter chose to leave @music alone and create its own @twittermusic brand before Musk bought it and installed himself as its CEO.
What X intends to do with the @music account moving forward is unclear. The music artist Ed Sheeran was pictured there on Thursday with a copy of his 2014 album “x,” which is pronounced “multiply.” An inquiry for comment was not immediately answered by Sheeran, X, or Musk’s representatives.
Despite not currently owning any shares, Vaught claimed to have previously invested in Tesla, an electric vehicle manufacturer run by Elon Musk. Additionally, he has paid a $100 refundable reservation fee for a Tesla Cybertruck, the company’s trapezoidal pickup truck, for which Tesla has not yet revealed final details, including pricing.
Despite creating new accounts on Mastodon and Threads, competitors to Meta’s text-based platform, Vaught said he was still using X.
Today, Twitter is still a hub for the software development community, according to Vaught. Therefore, just for that reason, it remains my most intriguing social.
Vaught was angry that X would replace a user who had spent 16 years using its platform with impersonal letters more comparable to a help ticket for technical support.
“I was definitely pleased of having built @music to a half million followers, give or take,” he continued. “I also develop software. I had been considering what I could create around this to perhaps profit from my audience.
When Twitter abruptly changed its identity to X last month, it took up another long-time user’s @X handle, highlighting issues with intellectual property and users’ rights on social media.
Vaught was given the handle @musicfan and given a list of alternative suggested handles after X informed him that he would have to give up his username. He claimed that after perusing those, he was disturbed.
He learned that, according to the website, @musicfan was founded in 2011. Vaught expressed the hope that X had not appropriated another user’s property in order to give it to him, but he was unable to receive a firm response from Musk’s social networking platform.
“The entire thing is just skeezy,” he declared.