Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to news and websites he dislikes | Hacker News Reader

Elon Musk’s X is throttling traffic to news and websites he dislikes

washingtonpost.com

198 pointsc5karl76 comments

Geezus was this ripped right out of HN.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37130060

They do at least credit HN.

> The Post’s analysis found that links to most other sites were unaffected — including those to The Washington Post, Fox News and social media services such as Mastodon and YouTube — with the shortened links being routed to their final destination in a second or less. A user first flagged the delays early Tuesday on the technology discussion forum Hacker News.

Not a problem really, given that they gave due credit to HN.

For what it's worth, nytimes.com links in t.co load at normal speed for me right now.

Update as of just now: it appears the links are no longer being throttled. Tested with multiple clients/browsers.

I'm no longer seeing it with NYT but still seeing it with Threads:

  curl -v -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.6 Safari/605.1.15' https://t.co/DzIiCFp7Ti

Also still seeing it with Substack:

  curl -v -A 'Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; Intel Mac OS X 10_15_7) AppleWebKit/605.1.15 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/16.6 Safari/605.1.15' https://t.co/6ziYzHwGB0

(Note that I just quickly grabbed a random substack.com link from Twitter search. I don't endorse and indeed haven't read the contents.)

I am seeing similar results on the web.

This just raises further questions!

Reading your post makes me think of the fraud accusations against the Wall Street Journal made by YouTube content creators a few years back. [1]

I doubt any website is blacklisted at all. Web-scale systems behave in weird and unexpected ways. That's it.

[1] For those who missed that silly 'scandal': The content creators that earned their living from making videos on YouTube were somehow unaware that the view counts displayed by that website were not strictly consistent. Because of that they ended up accusing a Wall Street Journal reporter (who was writing a story that happened to threaten their income) of falsifying some screenshots and videos.

Third party intermediaries, a.k.a. so-called "tech" companies, are a PITA. This proxying of URLs, i.e., redirecting through the intermediary's servers, is sadly commonplace, providing the intermediary with a wealth of data on what external links are followed by computer users leaving the so-called "tech" company websites. Facebook does it. Google does it with Google News. IIRC, Facebook has defended the practice as being some sort of safety measure for Facebook users. If true, that's great, but are there any legally-enforceable limits on collection of data on peoples' browsing habits in the process, or its subsequent use. Nope.

Here, we see how this redirection of external URLs can easily be used to manipulate and frustrate. Alongside of Facebook and Google's quarrels with certain governments trying to protect their news media, and subsequent removal of news for certain audiences, it's another example of so-called "tech" companies interfering with computers users' access to news. IMHO, we need to get away from using these self-interested intermediaries and start getting news directly from its sources.

To be clear, the issue IMO is not why a so-called "tech" company intermediary might interfere with computer users trying access news, it is the fact that they can.

https://ghostarchive.org/archive/VW9fm

-- Related --

X has started reversing the throttling on some of the sites, including NYTimes

Discussions on HN: (61-comments - 2023-08-16) : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37141478

Twitter post archive: https://archive.is/PW3eG

Is there a context for Musk’s “free speech absolutist” quote? I see it referenced frequently, but can’t seem to find the original.

He originally said it in response to a request from some (unnamed) governments to block Russian news sources after the invasion of Ukraine. (https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1499976967105433600)

Wasn't Musk's Twitter caught blacklisting comments regarding Russia's invasion of Ukraine? Sounds awfully hypocritical to defend the right to post unfiltered Russian propaganda while at the same time blacklist comments from Russia's invasion and ongoing genocide of the ukranian people.

Yes we should be able to see inside of Russia and what is going on over there and to see their propaganda because it can be quite informative as to their motivations and goals and what not.

https://archive.li/1CaFc

There is a certain sense that Elon Musk paid $44 billion to do this, so he has every right to do so.

I mean of course he has a right to do it; just like he has a right to throw away the sole valuable part of the thing he paid for (the brand). That doesn't make it any less stupid.

There is also a sense where it is frankly bad that having a lot of money means you get to do this.

I made this argument in response to people who called him out for calling Twitter employees back to the office. It is interesting, the response to the "well he owns it" argument seems to be correlated almost entirely with whether you agree with the substance of the action, independent of the righteousness.

Unless it violates something like the Sherman Act[1]. Obviously we don’t know if they are actually doing this throttling and I don’t know whether it would be considered anticompetitive behaviour under that act but it is an example of where even though he has paid the money he doesn’t have the right to do so.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act

The Sherman Act doesn't ban "anticompetitive behavior" exactly, it bans anticompetitive agreements. If you own a company, you can do whatever you want to screw over your competition. If you get together with some of your rival companies and agree to work together to screw over the rest of the competition, then you run afoul of the law.

I was thinking agreements were section 1 and anticompetitive behaviours were section 2. This bit https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/45

That said, I'm no expert and was just using it as an example.

Yes, and other people have every right to criticize him for doing it.

Nyoo not my favorite meme master 100 billionaire!!!

He likely has a _right_ to, but it does make his whole ‘free speech’ thing look a little silly (of course, it’s not the first of his actions to do that, by a long shot). Observers have a right to make fun of him for doing so, too.

I don't understand how it is anti free speech.

Well, when previous Twitter management did things like this, Musk said that they were restricting free speech. So this is at least anti "Musk's definition of free speech".

Properties like Twitter are more than just some corporation, it's a user base, and a history of user activity built on user generated content. That was trusted to an organization that, effectively, no longer exists.

He's legally free to do this, but morally is a whole other thing.

He owns Twitter, he probably has the right to do it as a private platforn owner, and it is still worth calling him out for doing it. Freedom of speech he is exercising is not freedom of criticism of speech.

Its especially worthwhile because Musk sold himself as an absolutist of a view of free speech in which platforms like Twitter were not exercisers of free speech but actors whose decision to shape and bias content violated their users rights to free speech.

Sure. And we have every right to call him an asshat who has made a fool of himself with his bleating about freeze peach, and lazy hypocrisy.

> There is a certain sense that Elon Musk paid $44 billion to do this, so he has every right to do so.

Even though you can argue the free speech angle regarding news publications such as the new York times, I'm not so sure if blacklisting links to competitors such as Threads is something that sits well with antitrust agencies.

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