Twitter Breaks Substack Links For Some Reason

Elon Musk, the debt-ridden mountebank currently in charge of Twitter, has barred users from interacting in specific ways with posts that contain links to Substack—an apparent attack on one of his own remaining bases of support.

Users noticed this morning that they were unable to like, retweet, or reply to tweets that link to Substack—though, oddly, they could quote-tweet them. (Or, as one user noted, reply to a quote-tweet of a quote-tweet of a tweet linking to Substack.) Tests carried out by Motherboard staff confirmed this, with attempts to carry out forbidden actions being accompanied by text reading, “Some actions on this Tweet have been disabled by Twitter.”

In the absence of an explanation from Musk or one of the Salacious B. Crumb-type minions with which he surrounds himself, this can only be presumed to be either another of the countless technical errors that have plagued the site since Musk fired most of its staff or an attempt to get attention for his struggling site, which has seen ad spending, which accounts for the vast majority of the company’s revenue, drop by at least 70% since his takeover last year.

Many users are surmising that the proximate cause of the ban—assuming it’s deliberate—is the recent announcement of Substack Notes, a new product from the email delivery service that sounds vaguely like Twitter in that it allows people to post things to the internet. “Imagine Kareem Abdul-Jabbar leaving a comment on Margaret Atwood’s note about trends in science fiction,” the inscrutable announcement post for the new product demanded. According to this theory, Musk would be either retaliating against the company or attempting to prevent it from using his service to start up a rival one.

Another theory is that Musk doesn’t know how his own service works and is attempting to crudely manipulate the algorithm powering it, which was recently published, revealing that likes in particular are strongly weighted in it. By denying users the ability to engage with posts carrying Substack links, the theory goes, Musk could radically limit the spread of this sort of content without contradicting his own loudly-professed and doubtless sincerely-held free speech principles.

Either way, those most affected would seem to be Substack users who rely on Twitter—and, more specifically, starting beefs and writing about topics that are completely incomprehensible to anyone who isn’t a Twitter power user—to drive subscriptions to their newsletters. (This includes me, as I use Substack to distribute a newsletter about tinned fish. Subscribe here!) Entire pseudo-publications have been bootstrapped off this model, notably at times with the assistance of oligarchs (like Musk). Why Musk would directly attack an entire class of actual and aspiring Founder-Americans whose most prominent members have either functionally or actually served as his public-relations agents remains unclear as of this writing. 

Twitter could not be contacted for comment as it has replaced its press department with an autoreply function that sends a poop emoji; it can be safely assumed that if this was a deliberate decision, it will be quietly reversed before too long amidst a great deal of blustering.