Elon Musk has appeared to confirm that his social media company X, formerly Twitter, throttles traffic to other websites by stifling any posts that contain outside 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 “find out what’s going on.”
“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking,” Musk replied.
Graham then questioned why it should be any less “lazy” for him to link to one of his essays in a reply rather than 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 applied a penalty to posts with hyperlinks, and Musk implicitly admitted this was true in October 2023.
“Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away,” Musk said at the time.
“Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.”
Since buying Twitter for $44bn in October 2022 and renaming it X, Musk has tried to foster a new creator economy on the platform by encouraging people to post their material there instead of elsewhere, and giving some users a share of its revenue for popular posts.
The hyperlink policy dovetails with his longstanding hostility to 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 due to the hyperlink policy and partly due to Musk’s embrace of far-right ideology and repeated boosting of fake news.
Earlier this month, British newspaper The Guardian announced that it would no longer post officially on X, calling it “a toxic media platform” whose owner had “used its influence to shape political discourse.”
