The other big news about Elon Musk this week – apart from the revelations in his soon-to-be-published biography – is that X is throttling links to news websites, specifically the New York Times. Once again, Musk seems to be missing the point. Just ask any OG Twitter user and they’ll tell you one of its best features is its links to interesting stories.
Twitter was this place of serendipitous discovery. I read things that I would never have come across anywhere else. Like how a newspaper always gives you so much more value. Not because of one story you clicked on, but because you’re reading all the stories on the page.
Yes, Twitter was, for a time, like reading a newspaper. It was a lively place.
The latest in a long line of mistakes
But since Musk bought it for $44 billion last October and rebranded the platform to X, it’s no longer the vibrant place it once was. In no small part, this is because of Musk’s juvenile habit of making impulsive decisions. It’s hard not to see the logic of Musk’s critics when he is venting his own frustrations against media outlets which criticise him.
Musk’s beef with the New York Times appears to have started after the paper ran an article on 2 August about EFF leader Julius Malema’s latest round of political agitation.
Musk tweeted: “The New York Times actually has the nerve to support calls for genocide! If ever there was a time to cancel that publication, it is now.”
He then suggested a way to defeat the paper’s paywall.
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A few days later, Musk tweeted that the paper was a “declining, once-powerful, but fundamentally doomed to be regional & increasingly archaic legacy publication.”
Links from Twitter to the Times abruptly stopped in July, according to researchers NewsWhip, which found the same did not happen to CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, that excellent online publication Semafor reported.
“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.
This really is a childish and petty reaction by Musk. At the end of August, the horrendous Albert Street fire ran on the front page of the New York Times for three days. What was Musk’s reaction to that?