Elon Musk claims that he bought Twitter, now called X, to preserve free speech. He claimed that everyone’s voice should be heard. However, as we’ve seen in recent months, this really translates to “only those that have opinions that I agree with”. And now the latest move by X is to slow down the links to websites that Musk has publicly feuded with.
Apparently, X is interfering with links to The New York Times, Mastodon, Bluesky, Threads and Substack, and forcing them to load noticeably slower, when clicked on from X. This comes after X was essentially hiding links to these sites in search. So much for free speech, eh?
It appears that the delay is about 5 seconds, when someone clicks on one of those links. Not a super long delay, but long enough to force someone to go back and possibly click on another link. That means that these sites are going to be getting less traffic from X – though, it’s not like X drives a lot of traffic anyways.
So much for that “Digital Town Square” Musk wanted
In addition to calling for Free Speech, Musk also wanted Twitter to be the “Digital Town Square”. Where everyone can join and talk about whatever they want. Though that’s not happening. If you disagree with Musk, apparently, you’re relegated to a slower town square.
This shouldn’t really come as a surprise, but it is rather disappointing. Obviously, Twitter was not well run before Musk took it over. And Musk has introduced a lot of changes in the almost year since he took over. Some of which are good and others which are not. But it’s really turning out that X is just going to be Musk’s mouthpiece. And given how many of his hardcore fans are on X and replying to every post he makes, that’s definitely likely.