Elon Musk’s Twitter has reportedly begun blocking links to its new competitor, Threads, following reports of a significant decline in Twitter’s web traffic after the launch of Mark Zuckerberg’s Twitter clone on July 5.
TechCrunch reports that Twitter has begun censoring links to Threads, a new rival from Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook (now known as Meta). Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino, has been quick to dismiss reports of declining Twitter traffic, one reason to block links to a rival, asserting that the site’s usage has been on the rise. “Don’t want to leave you hanging by a thread…but Twitter, you really outdid yourselves! Last week we had our largest usage day since February,” Yaccarino tweeted. “There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it.” The censorship comes despite Elon Musk’s self-proclaimed status as a “free speech absolutist.”
FILE- In this April 10, 2018, file photo, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg testifies before a joint hearing of the Commerce and Judiciary Committees on Capitol Hill in Washington. Last spring, as false claims about vaccine safety threatened to undermine the world’s response to COVID-19, researchers at Facebook wrote that they could reduce vaccine misinformation by tweaking how vaccine posts show up on users’ newsfeeds, or by turning off comments entirely. Yet despite internal documents showing these changes worked, Facebook was slow to take action. (AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)
However, data from web analytics firm Similarweb and a tweet by Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince suggest a different story. According to Similarweb, Twitter’s web traffic declined by five percent for the first two days Threads was available, compared with the week prior. Furthermore, Similarweb reported that Twitter’s web traffic was down 11 percent compared with the same days in 2022.
Matthew Prince, CEO of Cloudflare, also chimed in on the issue, tweeting, “Twitter traffic tanking,” accompanied by a graph of DNS rankings over time for Twitter.com where a steep decline was clearly visible.
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince 🌥 (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
The blockage of Threads links on Twitter was first noticed when users reported that searches for “url:threads.net” on Twitter returned no results, despite the presence of many tweets containing such links. This move by Twitter is seen as a response to the threat posed by Threads, which has already amassed over 100 million users since its launch.
This isn’t the first time Twitter has blocked links to a competitor’s website. After the launch of Substack Notes, Twitter began censoring those links by making the posts impossible to reply to, like, or retweet.
The rivalry between Twitter and Facebook has been heating up, with Twitter’s owner, Elon Musk, and Meta’s CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, engaging in a war of words on social media. Musk has even resorted to name-calling, further escalating the tension between the two tech giants. Musk tweeted “Zuck is a cuck,” and challenged the Facebook CEO to a “literal dick measuring contest.”
Read more at TechCrunch here.
Lucas Nolan is a reporter for Breitbart News covering issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan