Musk’s new edicts at the helm of social network X, formerly known as Twitter, have had a tangible impact on major news publishers such as The New York Times and Reuters, as well as rival social networks Facebook, Threads, Substack, Mastodon and Bluesky. according to the source, X now slows the loading time of platform-hosted links. At first glance this may seem like a small thing, but in reality it can turn into a disaster.

What’s going on

The download delay was first reported by an anonymous user of the hacker forum Hacker News. According to him, anyone trying to open a link to one of the banned sites will see a delay of at least five seconds, before being guided to the destination. The fact is that Twitter uses a special tool t.co to shorten the links posted on their page. Therefore, users should review this before coming to the selected site. At this stage, the company can influence the transition process. All affected resources were found to take longer to load than others like The Washington Post and USA Today.

• Slow downloads primarily affect the overall user experience. In the age of high-speed Internet, people are becoming increasingly impatient with slow-loading sites and may stop using this or that resource without even realizing that they are being artificially encouraged to do so. “Users not only expect to see results quickly and are frustrated when they don’t, but page speed instantly affects their professional opinion of you”said Diona Kidd of Knowmad Digital Marketing.
• But even worse, such actions by Musk could affect the profits of the affected sites. Page load speed affects the search engine ranking of an article or site: sites that load fast have higher positions in Google. Its algorithms, which scan not only the sites themselves, but also Twitter pages with links, prefer resources that do not load longer than 2.5 seconds. Thus, it reduces the number of potential audiences who will see the link and therefore the number of views of the ad, which is a source of income for many.

Thus, Elon Musk’s actions affect a number of processes, including ranking in search engines. Hacker News’ Anonymous says the delay was “so consistent and clearly intentional.”

• The day the download delays were discovered, Elon Musk called The New York Times “an advocate of racial genocide” in response to a news report about South Africa.
• Earlier, he attacked the same publication through an article about the shortcomings of his business and poor management style. The head of the company called the NYT’s reports “propaganda” and its news – the “Twitter equivalent of diarrhea.”
• Bluesky owner and former Twitter executive Jack Dorsey has criticized Musk for his disastrous leadership since he bought the company in October.
• Musk also targeted Substack after the company created a new feature that could be considered a rival to Twitter in April. Musk later changed the code on Twitter to prevent users from interacting with Substack or Substack-related content.
• On matters and the need for clarification: Musk has been blasting Mark Zuckerberg in the days since Meta’s new text-based social network rolled out, and is even considering suing for alleged intellectual property theft.

X, as usual, did not respond to requests for comment. Instead, The New York Times says it noticed the problem itself, but did not receive any explanation from the platform.

Elon Musk seems to be missing out on a few high-profile anticompetitive conduct cases.