Elon Musk, Once Again, Tries To Throttle Links To Sites He Dislikes

(Mis)Uses of Technology

Elon Musk’s commitment to free speech and the free exchange of ideas has always been been a joke. Despite his repeated claims to being a “free speech absolutist,” and promising that his critics and rivals alike would be encouraged to remain on exTwitter, he has consistently shown that he has a ridiculously thin skin, and a quick trigger response to try to remove, suppress, or silence those he dislikes.

In the past, we’ve talked about his efforts to ban links to platforms he was scared of, or the banning of links to platforms which he felt were unfairly competing with exTwitter, or how he would ban journalists if they annoyed him, or the banning of accounts of critics he had promised just weeks earlier to leave on the platform.

Basically, Musk has made it clear that he views content moderation as a tool to get back at whoever displeases him. The latest, as first revealed by the Washington Post, is that exTwitter is using the t.co shortcode links that Twitter control (and which it routes all links on the platform through) to throttle any links to certain sites, including the NY Times and Reuters, as well as social media operations he’s scared of, including Instagram, Facebook, Substack and Bluesky.

The company formerly known as Twitter has begun slowing the speed with which users can access links to the New York Times, Facebook and other news organizations and online competitors, a move that appears targeted at companies that have drawn the ire of owner Elon Musk.

It’s a weird kind of throttling, first noticed by someone on Hacker News, noting that if you clicked on any of the disfavored URLs, you’d get a 5 second throttle delay. As that user explained:

Twitter won’t ban domains they don’t like but will waste your time if you visit them.

I’ve been tracking the NYT delay ever since it was added (8/4, roughly noon Pacific time), and the delay is so consistent it’s obviously deliberate.

The NY Times itself confirmed this as well. However, that report also noted that after the Washington Post story started making the rounds, the throttle suddenly started to disappear.

The slowness, known in tech parlance as “throttling,” initially affected rival social networks including Facebook, Bluesky and Instagram, as well as the newsletter site Substack and news outlets including Reuters and The New York Times, according to The Times’s analysis. The delay to load links from X was relatively minor — about 4.5 seconds — but still noticeable, according to the analysis. Several of the services that were throttled have faced the ire of X’s owner, Elon Musk.

By Tuesday afternoon, the delay to reaching the news sites appeared to have lifted, according to The Times’s analysis.

My own spot test found that the throttling appears to be gone as well.

In the end, a short time delay is certainly not a huge deal, but it does, again, show how Elon is willing to weaponize the tools at his disposal to try to hurt those he dislikes, and does so in a way that is both transparently obvious and silly, but which seems less likely to be immediately noticed.

It is, of course, also another example of how fickle Musk’s actual commitment to “free speech” is. This is not new of course, and he is free to do this if he wants to. But he shouldn’t pretend that his view of free speech is somehow more noble than old Twitter’s when his reasons for such throttling are transparently petty payback, rather than based on any coherent policy.

Whatever you thought of old Twitter’s moderation practices, they were at least actually based on policy, and not whatever personally irked Jack or the trust & safety team.

Filed Under: elon musk, links, petty, throttling, vindictive
Companies: facebook, instagram, meta, ny times, substack, twitter, x