Social media
Twitter blocks links to rival platform
The logo of the news platform Twitter can be seen on the display of a smartphone. photo
© Karl-Josef Hildenbrand/dpa
Substack plans to offer a Twitter competitor soon. Recently, links to the blog platform have been blocked on Twitter. This not only annoys users, but also a prominent Musk employee.
Elon Musk’s Twitter is again trying to make it harder for its users to interact with a competing online service. Links to the Substack blog platform have been blocked since the weekend. A few days ago, Substack announced a service called Notes that could become a competitor for Twitter.
Links to content on Substack are blocked with the reference that they have been classified as potentially unsafe. “We hope this is a bug and temporary,” the Substack founders wrote in a response.
Twitter owner Musk, who also acts as the sole spokesman for the platform after the press department was dissolved, initially did not comment. Musk paid around $44 billion for Twitter and, after a slump in sales, is trying to boost business with subscription income, among other things.
With Substack, everyone can publish their texts and also market them as a newsletter in a subscription model. Among other things, some well-known journalists became self-employed and earn money with subscriptions. The authors used Twitter to direct their followers there to the Substack posts.
Twitter also used to have a newsletter platform called Revue, but it was shut down after Musk took it over in the fall. Many Revue users then ended up at Substack.
Twitter had already tried to restrict links to other online platforms in January. Among others, Facebook, Instagram and the Twitter alternative Mastodon were affected. The move was quickly reversed after heavy criticism.
Now the substack lock is also causing discord in the Musk camp. US journalist Matt Taibbi, hired by Musk to provide access to internal documents to uncover alleged abuses and government censorship at the platform, announced he would prefer his Substack presence to Twitter. Musk then unfollowed Taibbi’s profile.