We don’t know when X started limiting news links, but we do know that Elon Musk asked for it, and we basically know why.
Musk despises “mainstream media.” He wanted people to spend more time in his walled garden and for the walls to be so high that you couldn’t see out. For the umpteenth time, perhaps for the last time, people who published information allowed themselves to be fooled and revealed it. free.
Approximate timeline: In November 2022, on Musk’s orders, the site opened verification (the blue check) to anyone who wanted to pay for it. In July 2023, verified “creators” with large followings could sign up for revenue sharing: the more engagement they got, the more coins jingled into their accounts.
A month later, Musk took credit for changing the way news links were displayed, eliminating the photo preview, making it more appealing to click and leave Twitter-cum-X. And on Thanksgiving 2024, Musk confirmed, in a response, that the links were being snuffed out by X’s algorithm.
“Just write a description in the main message and put the link in the reply,” Musk wrote. “It just stops lazy links.”
Consumers did not complain about “lazy links.” Being online meant sharing links; on your GeoCities blogroll, on your WordPress blog, in your news, on Twitter, on
But social networks and news agencies were competitors, not partners. Both depend on the need to convince the reader/observer to stay in the same place: their place. Most media also ask for a fee or connection when you click to read the rest.
These media outlets have been fighting against blogs since their creation in the 1990s and have managed to shut down sites that plagiarized entire articles. On X, no one needed to share full articles. The goal now was to take a screenshot of the article’s most interesting graphics, or perhaps just its title, and publish it. Linking the story directly reduced the reach of the publication; Linking it in the first answer wasn’t really necessary.
Print articles are just one news outlet, but similar changes made embedding links to videos less attractive and made it easier to place videos directly on X. The app was already an omnibus news channel, where any story could be broadcast. Now he was absorbing these stories and separating them from their sources.
What was the impact? Not everyone stopped linking their sources, but those who did had a financial incentive. Even if they hadn’t signed up for the paid content program, it made more sense than ever to turn your account into a newspaper, leveraging other media as if they were wire services, all free.
This accelerated the evolution of amateur news publishing; that is, people who consumed information and wanted to share it, but did not announce it on their own. (This usually involves phone calls.) Journalists quickly adapted, many posting the links in the first replies to their first attention-getting posts. Amateurs adapted even more quickly.
And as they adapted, Twitter news began to look less like articles and more like Pinterest boards, with users embedding images of headlines or exciting paragraphs into their posts. This created some of the most fixable problems in print history.
First: the provenance and dates of reports have become more difficult to find. A high-paying, low-ROI method of getting views for a post was to recycle something that had gone viral in the past, like a cover band or a TikTok singer seizing an old hit.
Old stories have been blowing up on Twitter for years, and some media outlets (The Guardian, BBC News) even added tags to their stories to indicate when they were published. These tags didn’t mean much if the original story was no longer connected, and that was good for the usual “stupid human stuff” that makes the news one day and then fades from people’s memory. They could now be reheated more easily.
Second: Clickable headlines have stopped providing value to the news site. Blas Nuñez-Neto was promoted within the Biden administration when it (slowly) realized that its first border strategy had failed and that it needed to stop the flow of asylum seekers. He had told this story before. Last July, he said as much in a New York Times headline: “I was one of Biden’s border advisers. Here’s how to fix our immigration system.”
The vast majority of comments on the article made headlines, screenshotted and shared with no connection to the argument, with even former New York Times guest columnist JD Vance criticizing the absurdity of the headline. Lost, because so few people looked for the connection, was the author’s view: “The failure to recognize this reality and take timely action to try to resolve it cost Democrats much of the trust of American voters and contributed to President Trump’s return to the White House.” »
Third, and least controversial: more media revenue was lost. No one below colonoscopy age remembers the expectation of paying for a story to read the whole thing, but the hope that the news could be summarized on X, for free, sparked even more anger at paywalls.
Why pay a small fee to read a story if the gist of it can be displayed on your phone by someone who read it for you? Headlines were the easiest to cut out, but entire sections of articles were shared without a link or credit, traceable only if the reader had a good eye for fonts or could find a section of text indexed by the remnants of Google News.
These three problems made the readers a little dumber and the discourse a little more crude and lazy. (X’s product manager says it might roll back this feature, but its users are now conditioned to stealing information without links and with little credit.)
An unexpected promise of blogs, including TPM, was that infinite space to write and an infinite ability to link sources meant that readers were freed from the printed page and its breaks in space. Instead of paraphrasing, you can link to an entire source and embed quotes from it. Instead of stopping at 800 words, you can continue for as long as you want.
Some diarrheic writing arose from this freedom, but the medium encouraged real speech and punished cheap speech. In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman wrote that the telegraph turned America into a single neighborhood “populated by strangers who knew only the most superficial facts about each other.” Blogging kept us in this neighborhood, but gave us more space to understand each other, which many outsiders used. And many of them have ceased to be strangers.
Punitive ties have reduced all of that, exposing the world for free but encouraging people who can frame or copy the most salacious stories. This has been good for Musk and good for the public square he owns. The price for all this freedom was much stupider speech.
