As per a recent report from The Washington Post, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, now labeled as X, has introduced a brief five-second delay for specific websites like the New York Times, Reuters, Instagram, and Blue Sky, an alternative social network. This particular action is commonly recognized as throttling.
The websites experiencing the impact of these slow connections mainly consist of Twitter’s rivals and other media sources that have received unfavorable publicity, something Elon Musk shows distaste towards. The Washington Post conducted experiments and determined that when a user clicked on a link within Twitter directing them to an external site, there was a brief initial pause before the actual content loaded.
It is notable that only links originating from t.co, a site responsible for processing and shortening links on Twitter, seemed to encounter the delay. Nevertheless, the situation appeared to have been resolved by Tuesday afternoon, with links loading promptly upon clicking.
Musk’s Public Disapproval of Selected Media Sources
Elon Musk has been actively voicing his opposition against certain critics for a considerable time now. In a recent incident, Twitter categorized the BBC and NPR as “state-affiliated media,” leading to a strong reaction from these organizations and their staff. On the 12th of April, NPR announced their decision to part ways with Twitter, and since then, their homepage remains unchanged.
Historically, Musk has openly criticized the New York Times, denouncing it as “propaganda” and the “Twitter equivalent of diarrhea.” Presently, the news outlet’s Twitter page, hosting 55 million followers, no longer displays the “verified” badge, hence complicating the differentiation between authentic and counterfeit accounts for users.
During the same period, Twitter started labeling connections to Substack, an independent content publishing platform, as unsafe. This action was in response to Substack rolling out “Substack Notes,” providing a Twitter-like experience to their community of newsletter authors and readers, some of whom are paid subscribers. Substack argued that both Twitter and Notes could coexist harmoniously without competing but rather complementing each other.
Source of Image: Elonofficiall @ Instagram
