Elon Musk, owner of X (formerly Twitter) and CEO of Tesla has been accused of throttling traffic to websites that have been critical of him in the past. A report by The Washington Post has revealed that platform X has increased the load times of pages for news websites like The New York Times, wire agency Reuters, and even some of X's direct competitors which include Mastodon and Bluesky.
X is a social media platform where multiple news agencies and brands share links to their own website. Increasing the load times of these websites can have a direct impact on the traffic, which then goes on to affect the revenue of these pages. The WaPo report claims that the page load times were as high as 5 seconds. However, this time has been reduced considerably since the report was published.
X's direct rivals like Facebook, Meta (owner of Facebook and Instagram), Bluesky, Substack, and others are also facing problems with their load times. The delay has been facilitated through the t.co link-shortening domain.
A post on Hacker News, a tech forum, highlighted the link delay earlier on Tuesday, noting that X began delaying links to the New York Times on August 4th. On that same day, Musk criticized the Times' coverage of South Africa and accused the publication of endorsing genocide. However, there is no conclusive evidence linking the delay to Musk's remarks.
Elon Musk acquired Twitter in October last year and has been vocal against some of the most prominent news organizations and journalists critical of his companies, including Tesla and SpaceX. In the past, the billionaire temporarily blocked accounts of journalists and Elon Jet, a flight tracking account that Musk considered a safety hazard.
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