Key Takeaways
Twitter restricts access to Threads, raising concerns about anti-competitive practices.
Tech blogger criticizes Twitter for blocking links to Threads and says this goes against free speech.
Twitter has started blocking some links to a new social media app called Threads. Threads was made by the company Meta, which is the same company that owns Facebook. By blocking these links, Twitter is making it very hard for people to find and get to content on Threads.
This move from Twitter has made many people very concerned. They think Twitter is acting in an unfair way towards other companies that are competing with them.
The word they use is "anti-competitive." This means Twitter is doing things to try to prevent fair competition from other companies like Threads.
A tech blogger, Andy Baio was one of the first people to notice this problem. When he searched on Twitter for "url:threads.net", he saw that many of the results that should have contained links to Threads did not actually show up.
Andy Baio criticized Twitter strongly for blocking these Threads links. He said this behaviour goes against the idea of free speech that Twitter claims to support.
Baio accused Twitter of creating a "walled garden" – this means Twitter is isolating itself and preventing open discussion by blocking links to other platforms like Threads.
Hiding tweets about Threads seems fully in line with Twitter’s new anti-competitive stance, creating a fully walled garden that blocks open expression while hypocritically claiming to promote free speech.
Twitter's recent restrictions on Threads coincide with an incident involving Elon Musk and Meta. Musk criticized Meta for allegedly copying Twitter and even threatened a lawsuit against the company.
In his remarks, Musk also insulted Zuckerberg in an unethical way.
It seems the main reason Twitter is doing this is because they are worried Threads might take away some of Twitter's users. Threads grew extremely fast after it launched on July 5th – it gained over 100 million new users in just a few days!
This very quick growth likely made Twitter's leadership feel threatened.
Linda Yaccarino is the new boss or CEO of Twitter. She has said it is not true that Twitter is losing users because of Threads' success. However, Twitter's actions of blocking Threads links show they clearly see Threads as competition they need to try to limit.
Blocking links to competitor apps and websites is actually something Twitter has done before, not just with Threads.
Earlier in 2023, Twitter would not allow people to like or re-share tweets that had links to a feature from a company called Substack. Twitter even labelled all Substack links as "unsafe" for one day, though that was resolved quickly.
In another incident, Twitter reportedly blocked some Google Search links from showing up for people who did not have a Twitter account registered.
Doing this caused much less of Twitter's content to appear in Google's search results overall – around a 62% drop. This concerns companies that do marketing because reduced visibility in Google means their brands get much less traffic from Search.