X seemed to throttle some competitors and news sites for more than a week

If you recently clicked a link shared by The New York Times on X (formerly Twitter), you might have noticed that the page took a little longer to load than you would have expected. It wasn’t just the Times; according to an analysis by The Washington Post, links posted to X that point to the Times, Reuters, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack took about five seconds to actually load.

While I was writing this article, X seemed to fix the issue, and the sites are loading as expected from the platform. According to a post on Hacker News, the delay was put in place for The New York Times on August 4th. The user said that the delays appeared to involve Twitter’s t.co link shortener and also affected Meta’s Threads.

The list of affected sites included social media competitors to X (Meta, Bluesky, Substack) and news organizations that X owner Elon Musk has criticized, which could indicate that these delays were being implemented on a select basis. Most other links didn’t have delays; The Washington Post found that links to Mastodon, YouTube, The Washington Post, and Fox News loaded quickly, and that tracked with my own testing. (Links that pointed to The Verge worked as expected for me as well.)

Yoel Roth, X’s former head of trust and safety, has been discussing the issue on Bluesky. “This is one of those things that seems too crazy to be true, even for Twitter, until you see it inexplicably take 5 seconds for Chrome to receive 650 bytes of data,” he wrote.

If X was throttling these links, that behavior wouldn’t be totally out of the ordinary. After Substack announced its Twitter-like Notes feature, X (then Twitter) briefly disabled likes, replies, and retweets if a tweet had Substack links. At the end of last year, there was also a short period during which X abruptly banned users from promoting their presence on competitors like Instagram and Mastodon.

At that time, Musk said that Twitter would no longer allow “relentless free advertising of competitors.” But when Musk has reiterated that X / Twitter is a platform for free speech, any sort of throttling seems to fly in the face of that philosophy.

Here are statements from some of the organizations affected by the recent slowdowns. (Note that Substack and The New York Times provided their statements to The Verge before the slowdowns went away.)

Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi:

Substack was created in direct response to this kind of behavior by social media companies. Writers cannot build sustainable businesses if their connection to their audience depends on unreliable platforms that have proven they are willing to make changes that are hostile to the people who use them. 

While we hope that Twitter will reverse its decision to institute a delay on Substack links, our focus is on building Substack. We’re committed to making it a reliable place for writers to build their businesses. By creating a subscription network that fosters deep connections, we believe Substack can be a new space for readers and writers on the internet.

New York Times spokesperson Charlie Stadtlander:

We’ve seen the reports of a time delay being applied to X users seeking to visit New York Times links from the social media platform, and have made similar observations of our own. We have not received any explanation from the platform about this move.

While we don’t know the rationale behind the application of this time delay, we would be concerned by targeted pressure applied to any news organization for unclear reasons. The mission of The New York Times is to report the news impartially without fear or favor, and we’ll continue to do so, undeterred by any attempts to hinder this.

Reuters spokesperson Heather Carpenter:

We are aware of the report in the Washington Post of a delay in opening links to Reuters stories on X. We are looking into the matter.

Meta didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.

X’s press email address auto-replied with a message saying, “We’ll get back to you soon.” Musk said in July that this was an intentional change from the previous auto-reply, a poop emoji.