Musk admits to stifling links on X, users unhappy
Amidst repeated claims that “you are the media now,” Elon Musk, the owner of X, admits that the platform has been making it harder for people to read news on the website.
Image by Getty Images/Nathan Stirk.
Amidst repeated claims that “you are the media now,” Elon Musk, the owner of X, admits that the platform has been making it harder for people to read news on the website.
Musk – who is about to officially advise Donald Trump once he’s inaugurated as US President in January and who doesn’t even hide his contempt for what he calls “legacy media” – confirmed that X’s algorithm deprioritizes links in user posts.
The anti-woke billionaire was replying to technology investor and writer Paul Graham who complained about the deprioritization of posts with links in them and called it the platform’s “biggest flaw.”
“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking,” said Musk.
Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.
undefined Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 24, 2024
Graham wasn’t convinced, posting once again: “If I write a new essay and tweet a link to it, that's ‘lazy linking,’ but if I tweet that I've written a new essay and then put the link in a reply, that's somehow better?”
Musk didn’t reply this time. Later, he shared a post from a user called DogeDesigner explaining the practice. The latter said that links to external sites limit “your potential reach” and advised to upload content directly to X.
Quite obviously, reporting news from a news outlet without giving the link to the source is essentially content theft – and that’s what quite a few users immediately said.
But it’s safe to say that Musk doesn’t care – he frequently disparages mainstream media in favor of anonymous X accounts and actually spreads misinformation himself.
Suppressing posts with links isn’t new in the world of social media. For instance, Facebook has stated that it aims to prioritize content that keeps users engaged and active on the platform, so if a post includes an external link that leads users away from Facebook, it may be given less visibility than a post with an internal link or no link at all.
Sure, every external link is a doorway that could let users escape to the wider web – or even a competitor. Social media platforms all rely on advertising dollars for revenue so they need users to stay on them as long as possible.
However, in X’s case, at least some users including news organizations have been escaping precisely because they want less suppression and more engagement.
Millions of people have joined a competing platform Bluesky where links aren’t deprioritized, and some say that user engagement on Bluesky is already much better than on X.
hard to exaggerate how nuts the engagement is on Bluesky compared to 𝕏. a vastly smaller user base (at least officially), but just look at these stats for one of the biggest newspapers on Earth. Musk has absolutely trashed the platform. folks, you are not locked in on 𝕏. not even a little.
undefined Kevin Rothrock (@kevinrothrock.me) November 23, 2024 at 11:21 AM
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Bluesky now has nearly 23 million users, adding a few hundred thousand every day. Musk’s toy platform is meanwhile struggling – daily users keep dropping every month, and serious analysts dismiss X’s own inventive performance metrics.
Power users including journalists who have moved over to Bluesky say they like that there’s no deprioritization of posts with hyperlinks, and there are no blue check marks anyone can buy and pretend to be a serious news source.