Joshua Benton writes:

Whatever his intentions, last week’s destruction of headlines has been a disaster for those who rely on Twitter for news. In the short term, it led to a surfeit of joke tweets spreading confident lies about Musk himself, leading to the memorable Snopes headline: “Did Elon Musk Endorse Biden, Come Out as Transgender and Die of Suicide?” But especially with the new conflict between Hamas and Israel this weekend, the loss of headlines has made misinformation that much easier to spread. As one OSINT researcher put it yesterday: “For many reasons, this is the hardest time I’ve ever had covering a crisis on here. Credible links are now photos. On the ground news outlets struggle to reach audiences without an expensive blue checkmark. Xenophobic goons are boosted by the platform’s CEO. End times, folks.”

For many reasons, this is the hardest time I've ever had covering a crisis on here.

Credible links are now photos. On the ground news outlets struggle to reach audiences without an expensive blue checkmark. Xenophobic goons are boosted by the platform's CEO.

End times, folks.

— The Intel Crab (@IntelCrab) October 8, 2023

But I have good news! There is a way to bring back all the headlines Elon Musk took away — to return Twitter to something resembling the week-ago status quo. It’s free [unless you use Safari], and it’ll only take a few seconds of your time.

It’s a browser extension named Control Panel for Twitter. (Yes, Twitter, not X.) Control Panel offers lots of little tweaks to the Twitter user interface — some of which amount to personal preferences, but others that reverse bad choices the Musk-era company has made. (It can even replace that cheap Unicode X with the old familiar blue bird.)

On Thursday, developer Jonny Buchanan pushed an update that brought a new feature: returning headlines to links. [Continue reading…]