Elon Musk has appeared to confirm that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, diverts traffic to other websites by blocking any posts that contain external links.
Paul Graham, a powerful technology investor and columnist, complained on Sunday about “being denied tweets with links in them,” saying it made it difficult to “know what’s going on.”
“Just write a description in the main post and put a link in the reply. This will just stop lazy linking,” Musk replied.
Graham then asked why it would be “lazy” to link to one of his posts in a reply rather than the original post, but Musk had yet to respond as of Monday evening.
Journalists and tech analysts have been speculating for a long time that X’s ranking and recommendation algorithms applied a penalty to articles with hyperlinks, and Musk publicly admitted that this was true in October 2023.
“Our algorithm tries to maximize the time spent on X, so links are not targeted as much, because there is less time spent when people click,” Musk said at the time.
“The best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”
Since buying Twitter for $44 billion in October 2022 and renaming it X, Musk has tried to promote the new wealth of creators on the platform by encouraging people to post their content there and elsewhere, and by giving other users a share of their money for popular content. .
The hyperlink policy is in line with his long-standing hatred of the media, which has long been a source of misbehavior with many of his companies.
Journalists have had a hard time at X as a place to promote their work, partly because of the hyperlink policy and partly because of Musk’s embrace of far-right ideology and repeated proliferation of fake news.
Earlier this month, a British newspaper The Guardian announced that it would no longer officially broadcast on X, calling it a “toxic media site” whose owner “used its influence to create political discussions.”