Elon Musk Admits X Is Making It Harder for People to Read News

Nov 25, 2024 - 13:00

Elon Musk admitted that X (formerly Twitter) is throttling link-based posts, essentially stifling news articles on the social media platform.

In a reply to a post Sunday from technology investor and writer Paul Graham, Musk confirmed that X’s algorithm deprioritizes links, telling him to “just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”

Graham was not convinced, replying, “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 to Graham, and later retweeted a post from user DogeDesigner explaining the change. A host of replies from other users to Musk’s reply, as well as Graham’s post, showed that this change is disliked by many X users, particularly in the technology and programming fields that Musk and Graham are a part of.

Twitter screenshot Nicholas A. Christakis @NAChristakis: Plus you cannot provide scientific and other citations which is what makes twitter so useful for so many of us. Twitter screenshot Perry E. Metzger @perrymetzger: I have to agree with Paul here. I understand the desire to maximize return on investment given how much X cost to buy, but people really do need to be able to link to high-quality external primary sources. Not being able to do that makes the platform worse.