Here is an Easter cabaret matinee with the owner of Twitter and a (perhaps former) employee of the newsletter-publishing platform.

Over the last few days, several publishers have said that they cannot use Substack links on Twitter or have no way to interact with a tweet with a link to a Substack article. With around a quarter of Substack’s traffic coming from social platforms (and Twitter accounting for 61% of that), it is safe to say that the Twitter-Substack debate has seen a significant drop in traffic for the latter. The discussion is mainly related to Substack Notes, a Twitter-like feature where short posts can be published (similar to “the bird platform”).

Elon Musk and Matt Taibbi were on relatively good terms a few months ago when Taibbi published a series of investigative articles called Twitter Files, using thousands of files for internal use, touching on Hunter Biden’s (son of the US President) laptop, Twitter’s direct reduction of reach on certain accounts, and the de-platforming of former US President Donald Trump. Musk retweeted these, prompting Twitter’s new owner to stand by Taibbi.

“Since sharing links to my articles is a primary reason I came to this platform, I was alarmed and asked what was happening. I was given the option of posting articles on Twitter instead. I’m staying at Substack and moving to Substack Notes next week,” Taibbi wrote on Friday. Musk responded on Saturday, “Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is untrusted. It turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.”

The punchline (or rather, criticism of Musk’s behavior) is something else that happened: Musk (who the tweet described as “an account that mostly reposts old memes”) is, quite simply, no longer following Taibbi. After all, we can’t be surprised by his almost childish behavior. Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters has a street banner. From it, he has removed the letter W to create a meaningful pun in English referring to female breasts. However, the landlord has ruled that they are legally obliged to leave the banner as Twitter. He then repainted the letter W to match the background color.

No comment.

Source: WCCFTech