Roundup: The Twitter/Substack Easter weekend beef

A selection of articles covering recent Substack link restrictions on the Twitter platform

Image credit: Canva

On April 6, Twitter users started to notice Substack links were restricted on the platform. Upon clicking such, a warning screen popped up informing users the links could be harmful, spammy or did not respect Twitter’s terms of service. Furthermore, one could not retweet or like posts containing such links.

On April 9, the warning and other associated restrictions had disappeared.

Some commentators believe those actions were retribution for the imminent release of Substack Notes, a sort of microblogging network for Substack users (which has Twitter-like features).

Here is a selection of articles covering this rather strange situation:

“Bad for business” (link)

Jay Peters and Emma Roth gathered comments from the Substack community, focusing on financial consequences of the restrictions on writers (via The Verge).

Elon Musk denies links were blocked (link)

Matt Novak reports in Forbes that Elon Musk, CEO of Twitter, denies the links were ever blocked (playing semantics). Musk also claimed that Substack attempted to “download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone”.

Twitter redirects Substack searches to "newsletter" (link)

Besides the link restrictions, Chance Townsend (Mashable) reports that “Substack” searches on Twitter are being redirected to "newsletter" instead. This was still in effect at the time of writing.

A “dumb reason” (link)

Timothy B. Lee (Ars Technica) discusses the retributive aspect of the restrictions.

Matt Taibbi claims he will leave Twitter (link)

Matt Taibbi, “Twitter Files” writer and a high profile journalist on Substack among other things, said Twitter suddenly became unusable (via Peony Hirwani/The Independent).

End of restrictions (link)

Igor Bonifacic (Engadget) details the reversal of the limitations.