It feels that many of X's current perceptual issues would melt away if Elon and Co. developed a media and comms team to articulate its public stance on those key elements.

The last week or so has seen both Elon and X CEO Linda Yaccarino make vague statements about certain elements, which created media spin, some of which was wrong or unfairly judgmental.

For example, Elon mentioning that X's antidote to the botting will come in the form of charging users "a small monthly payment" to access X, to defeat bots. That's ignited reports across the board, stating X will soon charge all its users-not exactly what Musk said, but for his bot-battling plan to work, he'd essentially need the vast majority of X users to pay.

So he didn't say it, but in a way did, while Musk has also hinted at this as well in the past.

Official comms team would have clarified all that straight away, but with a press email that gives you an auto "we'll get back to you soon" response, the media is left to speculate, which logically meant a flood of "X is planning to charge all users" headlines.

Meanwhile, this week, Yaccarino's weird interview at Code Conference left people with a heap of questions that Yaccarino seemed unwilling, or unsure how to answer.

How many daily active users does X have? How many monthly users? Is hate speech declining? All of these are numbers that you would assume Yaccarino would have on hand, while the question of whether X is actually planning to charge all users also went unanswered, with Yaccarino seemingly unsure what Musk had announced on this.

Which implies, once more, that it's at least been discussed, but rather than shedding any light or clarity on the topic, X was pilloried again with Yaccarino herself in view this time for apparently being - as she observed in this interview, "CEO in name only.".
Which, in itself further muddies the waters, as this stat directly contradicts what Musk said last week, when he said X is seeing 200 million posts per day.

For clarity, Musk said that:

"There are 500 million, um, 550 million monthly users, now going to maybe 600 million monthly users, and any given day there's on the order of 100 to 200 million posts to the system."

Elon did note that the number he referenced was minus re-posts. Well, so does that mean that there are 300 million re-posts a day? No way; at least not by double.
 
We will never know, of course because we have no one to ask; once again, it will be left up to speculation and criticism or at least skepticism of the move by X.
Which seemed part of what bothered Yaccarino in her remarks, that the media was obsessed with the old stuff, that it was weirdly obsessive about metrics, while blind to the bigger perspective that X is doing something completely outside the old playbook, and is making great strides in this revolutionary new path.

Except, it isn't.

X has ambitions to become a whole new platform, which will facilitate more video engagement, payments in-stream, shopping, banking, and more. That's Elon's "everything app" plan, but until now, nearly all of the innovations that X has come up with, which Yaccarino was so eager to tout, have actually been old projects that the previous Twitter team had actually developed, and that the remaining X crew has simply pushed out, clearing its old development shelf.

Community Notes has been under development since 2021, while Twitter already had in-app live-streaming since 2016. Twitter Blue was already on offer as a subscription package; they just added verification into the mix, then changed the name.

As for actual, start-to-finish, large-scale app updates in scope, the X team has done very little. Which is understandable, since the team is functioning with a much, much smaller dev team now and running up against code variations and mismatches that make such updates increasingly difficult.

For instance, it's very hard for the X team to remove all the references of birds in the application, who would love to do this to complete its X re-brand. It is very difficult for X to roll out large-scale video streaming updates because it constantly needs to update several layers of code across a few servers.

It makes sense that this is hard to traverse, and in that regard, the X team is clearly improving. But it's not innovating at some astronomical pace, at least from a users' perspective. The UI is pretty much the same, the in-app experience is the same as always. Yaccarino can't really be expecting showers of praise for the team's progress, which are largely internal at this stage.

But again, all of this could be nuanced by an official comms team that could convey updates of X's status. Instead of placing Yaccarino on the hot seat, the comms team would have had their official stances prepared, usage statistics, updates on progress, all of this known and ideally qualified with data in advance before Musk or Yaccarino is thrust into the spotlight.

Or maybe that simply cannot happen, given Musk's loose-lipped personality. Maybe that just isn't how Musk does things, given his long-standing aversion to advertising.

Or perhaps it just is that this is all part of the plan, that everything listed here is the media game in and of itself, that with each speculated update comes more coverage by the media.

If that's the plan, it's certainly working, because X remains very much in the media crosshairs-even if this post is an example of more clickbaiting than reporting. But damaging, too - that CEO and owner seem at odds on various elements, that user numbers remain a question, that they won't provide their own official reports on hate speech.

If X has the data, why not share it, and silence the media debate? If X is going so well, why not back that up with the numbers on each element?

He has hinted at this before- that being in the media frenzy, good or bad, is actually good for business.
Maybe that's it, and it doesn't need a comms department. But it does seem like most of the confusion around the app could easily be addressed. The fact that it's not suggests that the actual numbers are not as good as X keeps saying.