Substack’s Twitter Block Brings Platform – Reach!
Elon Musk is again trying to make it more difficult for Twitter users to interact with a competing online service. Links to the Substack blog platform have been blocked since the weekend. Substack had one Announced service called Notes, which could become a competitor for Twitter. In January, Twitter briefly blocked links to Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon, among others.
Now links to content are blocked at Substack with the reference, they are classified as potentially unsafe been. “We hope this is a bug and temporary,” the Substack founders wrote in a response.
Twitter owner Musk, who also acts as the sole spokesman for the platform after the press department was dissolved, initially did not comment. Musk paid around $44 billion for Twitter and, after a slump in sales, is trying to boost business with subscription income, among other things.
Anyone can publish their texts on Substack and also market it as a newsletter in a subscription model. Among other things, some well-known journalists became self-employed and earn money with subscriptions. The authors used Twitter to direct their followers there to the Substack posts.
Twitter also used to have a newsletter platform called Revue, but it was shut down after Musk took it over in the fall. Many Revue users then ended up at Substack.
When Twitter tried to restrict links to other online platforms in January. the step was quickly reversed after heavy criticism.
Now the substack lock is also causing discord in the Musk camp. US journalist Matt Taibbi, who was hired by Musk to provide access to internal documents to uncover alleged abuses and state censorship at the platform, announced that he will prefer his Substack presence to Twitter. Musk then unfollowed Taibbi’s profile.
