We don’t know the minute when X started throttling links to news, but we know that Elon Musk asked for it, and we basically know why.
Musk disdains the “legacy media.” He wanted people to spend more time in his walled garden, and to build the walls so high that you couldn’t see outside of them. For the umpteenth time, maybe for the last time, people who published news were lulled into giving it away gratis.
Rough 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 big followings could sign up for revenue-sharing: The more engagement they got, the more coins clinked into their accounts.
One month later, Musk took credit for a change to how news links were displayed, eliminating the photo preview, which had made it more appealing to click and leave Twitter-cum-X. And over Thanksgiving 2024, Musk confirmed, in a reply, that links were being smothered by X’s algorithm.
“Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Musk wrote. “This just stops lazy linking.”
Consumers hadn’t complained about “lazy linking.” To be online was to share links; on your GeoCities blogroll, on your WordPress blog, in your news story, on Twitter, on X. Newsletters, the latest sustainable-looking media product, started as collections of links, and the good ones still used them to prove that their sources were real.
But social networks and news organizations were competitors, not partners. Both depend on convincing the reader/watcher to stay in one place — their place. Most news outlets also asked for some fee or login when you click to read the rest.
These outlets had fought with blogs since their inception in the 1990s, and they succeeded in shutting down sites that plagiarized complete articles. On X, no one needed to share full articles. The incentive now was to take a screenshot of the article’s most interesting grafs, or maybe just its headline, and post it. Linking the story directly shrank the post’s reach; linking it in the first reply was not really necessary.
Print articles are just one vehicle for news, but similar changes made it less attractive to embed links to videos and easier to put the videos right on X. The app already was an omnibus news channel, where any story could break through. Now, it was absorbing those stories and separating them from the sources.
What was the impact? Not everyone stopped linking their sources, but those who did had a cash incentive. Even if they didn’t join the pay-for-content program, it made more sense than ever to turn your account into a newspaper, pulling from other media outlets like they were wire services, all free.
This sped up the evolution of news posting for hobbyists; i.e., people who consumed news, and wanted to share news, but did not break it on their own. (That usually involves phone calls.) Reporters adjusted quickly, many posting the links in the first replies to their attention-getting first posts. The hobbyists adjusted even faster.
And as they adjusted, news on Twitter started to look less like articles, and more like Pinterest boards, with users embedding pictures of headlines or exciting paragraphs in their posts. This created some of the most fixable problems in the history of the printed word.
First: The provenance and dates of news stories became harder to find. A high-reward, 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 TikTok singer grabbing onto an old hit.
Old stories had rocketed around Twitter for years, and some news outlets (The Guardian, BBC News) even appended tags to their stories to note when they were published. Those tags didn’t mean much if the original story went un-linked, and that was good for the usual “stupid human tricks” that make news one day then cycle out of people’s memories. They could now be re-heated more easily.
Second: Clicky headlines stopped providing value to the news site. Blas Nuñez-Neto had been promoted inside the Biden administration when it (slowly) realized that its first border strategy had failed, and it needed to halt the flow of asylum-seekers. He’d told the story before. This July, he told it under 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 commentary about the piece hit the headline, screenshotted and shared with no link to the argument, with even former New York Times guest columnist JD Vance riffing on the absurdity of the headline. Lost, because so few people chased the link, was the author’s point: “The failure to acknowledge this reality and take timely action to try to resolve it cost Democrats a great deal of trust with American voters and contributed to President Trump’s return to the White House.”
Third, least controversially: More media revenue got lost. Nobody below colonoscopy age remembers the expectation of paying for a news story to read the whole thing, but the expectation that news could be summed up on X, for free, stirred up even more ire at paywalls.
Why pay a nominal fee to read a story if the guts of it can be displayed on your phone by someone who read it for you? Headlines were the easiest to clip, but entire sections of stories were being shared without link or credit, trackable only if the reader had a good eye for fonts or could find a section of text indexed by the vestiges of Google News.
All three problems made readers a little stupider, and the discourse a little more coarse and lazy. (X’s head of product says that they might undo this feature, but its users are now conditioned to pilfering pieces of news with no link and little credit.)
One unexpected promise of blogs, including TPM, was that infinite space to write and infinite ability to link sources meant that readers were free of the printed page and its cuts-for-space. Instead of paraphrasing, you could link a whole source, and embed quotes from it. Instead of stopping at 800 words, you could go on for as long as you like.
Some diarrheic over-writing came out of that freedom, but the medium encouraged real discourse and punished cheap discourse. In “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” Neil Postman wrote that the telegraph turned America into a single neighborhood “populated by strangers who knew nothing but the most superficial facts about each other.” Blogs kept us in that neighborhood, but gave us more space to understand each other, which a whole lot of strangers used. And many of them stopped being strangers.
Punishing links shrunk all of that down, putting the world on display for free, but encouraging people who could cadge or copy the most salacious stories. It’s been good for Musk, and good for the town square that he owns. The price of all this freedom has been a far stupider discourse.
Not quite sure why Musk would want to keep people away from the mainstream media… They are pushing the MAGAt line as well as he is, AND, they continually reinforce that the Democrats are to blame for everything.
Your mom.
Nice seeing you here Dave.