Elon Musk appears to confirm that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, is throttling traffic to other websites by suppressing posts containing external links.
Paul Graham, an influential tech investor and essayist, had complained on Sunday about X's “deprioritization of tweets with links in them,” saying it made it harder to “figure out what's going on.”
“Just write a description in the main message and post the link in the reply. This just stops the lazy linking,” Musk replied.
Graham then wondered why it would be less “lazy” for him to link to one of his essays in a reply instead of an initial post, but Musk had not responded further as of Monday evening.
Journalists and tech analysts had long suspected that X's timeline ordering and recommendation algorithms imposed a penalty on hyperlinked posts, and Musk implicitly admitted this was true in October 2023.
“Our algorithm tries to optimize the time spent on X so that links don't get as much attention because less time is spent when people click away,” Musk said at the time.
“It is best to post long-form content on this platform.”
Since buying Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renaming it of revenue to give for popular posts. .
The hyperlink policy is in line with his longstanding hostility toward traditional media, which has often reported on misconduct by his many companies.
Journalists, in turn, have soured on X as a place to promote their work, partly because of its hyperlink policy and partly because of Musk's embrace of far-right ideology and repeated encouragement of fake news.
Earlier this month the British newspaper wrote The Guardian announced that it would no longer officially post on X, calling it “a toxic media platform” whose owner had “used his influence to shape political discourse.”
