On Thursday, Twitter blocked people using Substack from embedding tweets in their stories. Then, early Friday morning, Twitter Substack blocked engagement on tweets containing links.
Then users couldn’t like or retweet those tweets, but they were able to retweet the quote. Then on Friday morning, Twitter also applied these restrictions to tweets from the official Substack account.
Even Matt Taibi, the journalist who wrote the Twitter Files, complains about it.
CEO Elon Musk hasn’t tweeted anything about Substack recently, and when asked for comment, he automatically responded with a poop emoji, as Twitter’s press email has done since mid-March.
Substack’s Notes feature adds very Twitter-like elements to the newsletter platform. Matt Taibbi, a journalist specially selected by Musk to turn the Twitter Files into news, said on Friday he was told by an obscure party that he was “offended about Twitter’s new Substack Notes feature and viewed it as a hostile competitor.”
He also stated that he was “given the option to post my articles on Substack instead of Twitter.” So Taibi stated that he will no longer use Twitter.
In December, Musk called “brutal advertising by competitors” a policy violation and blocked sharing links to Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook, and others. However, these restrictions were later lifted.
Now that he feels Substack is trying to compete with Twitter, he may have decided to bring it back, but for now, let’s just say that you can at least tweet the Substack link. Anyone trying to follow it will just have to click on the alert to get to the content.
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