Twitter restricts engagement with Substack links after Substack launches rival Notes feed

What he said or did

Days after Substack announced Substack Notes, a Twitter-like feed, Twitter stopped users liking, retweeting or replying to posts containing Substack links and showed warnings on them; searches for substack returned newsletter results.

Background

Musk said Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.

Official response

Substack CEO Chris Best said None of this is true and that Substack had complied with Twitter's API rules.

What happened next

Twitter lifted the engagement restrictions by 9 April 2023, though search substitution continued for a time. In September 2023 The Markup found links to Substack, Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram still loaded far more slowly via X's link shortener.

Sources

Engadget
9 Apr 2023
Nieman Lab
7 Apr 2023

This entry records what was publicly said or done, as reported by the sources above. Quotes are attributed to the person who made them.

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