Musk slowing down traffic on X to websites for NYT, FB and competitors
4 Min Read
Traffic is routed through the domain, allowing X to track and manage activity to the target, potentially stealing traffic and ad revenue from entities Musk personally dislikes.
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X and Tesla CEO Elon Musk attends an event during the Vivatech fair at the Porte de Versailles exhibition center in Paris, on June 16, 2023. (AFP)
X, formerly Twitter, has been slowing down the speed of user entrance to websites such as Facebook, The New York Times, and other news websites and competitors that have criticized X owner Elon Musk.
According to tests done Tuesday by The Washington Post, once the link posted on X was pressed for one of the websites, users were made to wait around five seconds before seeing the page, which included rivals like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack, in addition to the Reuters wire service and The Times.
A user reported the delays on Tuesday on the tech discussion forum Hacker News.
Hours after the test results came out Tuesday afternoon, X began reversing the delay times back to zero, which in turn affected the t.co domain, a link-shortening service X uses to process every link posted. Through the domain, traffic is routed allowing X to track and manage activity to the target, potentially stealing traffic and ad revenue from entities Musk personally dislikes.
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The test analysis further found that links to other sites unaffected such as The Washington Post, Fox News, and social media services such as Mastodon and YouTube, as traffic to enter took a second or less.
A spokesman for The Times, Charlie Stadtlander, released a statement saying that the news outlet “made similar observations of our own” regarding the delays and “not received any explanation from the platform about this move.”
“While we don’t know the rationale behind the application of this time delay, we would be concerned by targeted pressure applied to any news organization for unclear reasons,” he added.
Meanwhile, Substack’s co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi stated to The Post that they called on X to reverse the delay on its links. “Substack was created in direct response to this kind of behavior by social media companies".
“Writers cannot build sustainable businesses if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that have proven they are willing to make changes that are hostile to the people who use them.”
'Twitter equivalent of diarrhea'
A mobile traffic study by Google back in 2016 demonstrated that 53% of users left a website if it took longer than three seconds to load.
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Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, took to Bluesky on Tuesday to say that the delays were “one of those things that seem too crazy to be true, even for Twitter,” and added that “Delays are annoying enough, even subconsciously, to drive people away".
Tests conducted by The Post could not determine when the delays began but the Hacker News user, told the Post on condition of anonymity because of not being authorized to speak publicly, that he first saw delays to the links of Times stories on August 4.
That same day, Musk began rambling on against the news organization, calling it a “racial genocide apologist” and urged users to cancel their subscriptions right after the Times released a report on the political controversy in South Africa, where he was born.
Musk has called the Times “propaganda” and the “Twitter equivalent of diarrhea” and removed its “verified” badge from the now 55-million-follower account, making it harder for users to tell fake from true accounts.
The real tragedy of @NYTimes is that their propaganda isn’t even interesting
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) April 2, 2023
Links to Facebook, Instagram, and the new microblogging service Threads were also impeded and all three are owned by Meta, whose founder and chief Mark Zuckerberg has been going head-to-head with Musk.
Traffic to Bluesky, a platform started with help from former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, was delayed as it is known to criticize Musk’s leadership.
