I fondly remember the days when I was cheering for Elon Musk’s risky decision to buy Twitter and remake it as a bastion for free speech. Good times… But the situation has clearly undergone a slow evolution unrelated to the bizarre decision to begin calling it “X.” Numerous examples have cropped up where particular accounts have been locked while the visibility of tweets from others appeared to be suppressed. Unfortunately, these stories have been largely anecdotal and we rarely saw any sort of confirmation from Musk and his remaining development team members. But recent developments suggest there was some truth to the rumors and they involve the account of the New York Times. Over the past several months, they have noticed a dramatic drop in audience engagement in their posts, a shift not showing up in the accounts of other major media outlets. (Daily Beast)

Posts to X, formerly Twitter, containing links to the New York Times appear to reach far fewer viewers than they did just a few months ago, according to a report by Semafor. Data shows a cratering in audience engagement starting in late July on posts that link to articles by the Times—a drop not reflected in posts linking to other major news outlets like Politico or The Washington Post. The social media giant, run by Elon Musk, did not comment on the apparent throttling, which reportedly hasn’t gone unnoticed in the Times newsroom.

As I mentioned, there is more than simply anecdotal evidence to support this. Over at BoingBoing, they have the results of a data analysis project published at Semafor. The chart provided at the link tracks the user engagement patterns for the Times, Politico, the Washington Post, and the Wall Street Journal from May until September. In mid-July, the Times was well ahead of all of the rest with an average of more than 200K engagements per post as measured on 300K popular accounts. By September, they had plunged to less than 25% of that volume, beating only the WSJ. (Which always has a much lower volume, likely because almost all of their content is paywalled.) Meanwhile, Politico soared in volume.

While we don’t have similar data for other sites, reports of these anomalies were showing up nearly a month ago. The NY Post reported that Twitter/X was throttling response times for links going to Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, Substack, and Reuters. Anyone clicking on the links to those sites might wait up to five seconds for the results to load, while other links were responding instantly.

X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has been slowing the speeds at which users can access links to rivals and news sites that have come under criticism from owner Elon Musk, according to a report.

Users who click into links to stories from the New York Times, Facebook and other news outlets and competitors were forced to wait around 5 seconds before the page appeared, according to an analysis conducted by the Washington Post.

Musk has made no secret of the fact that he dislikes the reporting of the Times, and he frequently criticizes them. I can’t say that I disagree since their newsroom has tilted so far to the left that it’s amazing that the building hasn’t toppled over yet. But that’s really not the point here, is it? Musk originally claimed that he was taking over Twitter because the old owners were suppressing free speech and using illicit, hidden tactics to do so. But it would appear that Musk is now using the same tactics he accused the previous management of employing. The only difference is that it’s a different ideological group being suppressed.

This is not an improvement and it’s not free speech. It’s just a different strategy of censorship and different groups being censored. When it comes to social media, the solution to bad reporting is to counter it with links to better reporting. If you object to certain “bad opinions” you see, put forward or highlight “better opinions” to counter them. That’s the essential nature of a debate, right?

Do better, Elon. We know you have it in you. Doing the right thing isn’t always easy and doing the wrong thing can obviously be tempting. But we’re living in a country today where “wrong” is getting a serious leg up over “right” and you’re one of the people in a unique position where you can improve things.