The social network, which recently changed its name, is in the process of reviewing certain aspects of its site. By changing a message, the Twitter teams left a huge spelling mistake.
Since July 24, 2023, Twitter has officially changed its name to X. The decision, taken impulsively by Elon Musk, has given rise to many problems, whether in terms of the display of images (the little bird blue, the old Twitter logo, didn’t disappear right away), or even the name of the app.
More than the name of the social network, it’s all the vocabulary around its use that has changed. Thus, we no longer say a tweet but a publication, retweets have become reposts, and even the term twittos, used to talk about fans of the platform, is no longer used: we now say X’o (but no one really says it). But not all of these changes happen automatically: some terms used on the site must be changed manually. And since August 9, 2023, for people using X in France, a strange message is displayed when you want to reply to a tweet: ” post your answer! »
A typo on the French version of Twitter
The huge spelling mistake was first spotted on August 9 in the morning by Vincent Flibustier, the founder of the parody site Nordpresse and specialist in fake news. As he also specified, the fault only appears on the desktop version of the site: on the app, another message is displayed: “ post your answer », What Numerama was able to verify.
The messages — and the misspelling — are new. Previously, when you wanted to reply to a tweet, the text that was displayed was ” tweet your response “. A terminology that had become obsolete before the name change of Twitter, and which therefore had to be changed by the teams of the social network. The mistake must have been made then, when filling in the new text.
Questioned by Numerama, the press service of X did not provide us with more details on the origin of the fault – but it did not answer us with the usual poop emoji.
The fact that the X teams got it wrong is indicative of poor internal organization, but above all of a glaring lack of personnel. Such a huge mistake should have been spotted before the text was validated, or directly after. Ideally, it would have already been repaired — but it was still visible late afternoon on August 9, 2023.
This is not the first time that the lack of personnel at Twitter has led to major problems on the social network. Shortly after his arrival at the head of Twitter, Elon Musk laid off 50% of employees overnight, sometimes based on irrelevant criteria. This great purge had been partly at the origin of a huge breakdown that occurred on the social network in March 2023. A single engineer had been responsible for making a change in the code of Twitter, and the latter, having no one to whom to have his work proofread, would have sent it without verification. Unfortunately, his lines of code had an error. A clumsiness that had made the site inaccessible for almost a whole day.
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