Elon Musk Accused of Deliberately Slowing Down Links to News Outlets and Competitors on XTests by major news outlets revealed approximate five-second delays when accessing targeted websites.
Key Takeaways
- Elon Musk's X platform, formerly Twitter, has been accused of deliberately slowing links to news outlets and competitors.
- Musk has been associated with similar traffic-sabotage practices in the past.
Elon Muskis under fire over allegations that his social media platform X (formerly Twitter) engaged in deliberate slowdowns of links leading to websites likeThe New York Times, Reuters and news outlets that have been ridiculed by Musk in the past, as well as X competitors like Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook,The Washington Postreported.
When clicking on a link to one of the targeted websites, users had to wait approximately five seconds for the page to appear, confirmed by tests conducted at thePostand later theTimesandReuters.
ThePostpublished an article detailing the delay around 1 p.m. on Tuesday, and the outlet later reported that "hours after" the story was published, loading times returned to normal. X confirmed to Reuters that the delay had been lifted but did not provide further detail.
The timeline of the link slowdown and interference, also called "throttling," is unclear. However, a user on the tech forum Hacker News wrote early Tuesday that the delays of links toTimesarticles began as early as August 4, Reuters reported.
Although a five-second delay is relatively minor, data from analytics firmLittledatafound that in September 2022, sites with loading time under 2.9 secondsare typically shown in the top20% of search results, with anything under 2.2 seconds appearing in the top 10%. This implies that a five-second delay could hurt the targeted websites, Gizmodoreported.
Musk, a self-proclaimed "free speech absolutist," has in the pastopenly ridiculednews outlets like theTimesandsuspendedjournalists from X. Musk has engaged in similar practices of sabotaging traffic to other platforms and outlets since he acquired the social media platform in October 2022.
In December of last year, Musktemporarily bannedX accounts that were promoting rival social media platforms like Mastodon and Post. Then, in April, a day after Substack announced it would launch a Twitter competitor, Substack writers wereprohibitedfrom including tweets in their newsletters, and the circulation of Substack newsletters on X was blocked the following day.
Substack was also among the group of sites affected by the recent throttling.
"While we hope that Twitter will reverse its decision to institute a delay on Substack links, our focus is on building Substack," Substack founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi told theTimes. "Substack was created in direct response to this kind of behavior by social media companies."
