By Hera Rizwan
Twitter and its CEO Elon Musk have made headlines for several reasons since Musk's takeover of the microblogging site. In the latest, it appears that Twitter was feuding with the newsletter platform Substack over the weekend. On Friday, Twitter allegedly began restricting access to Substack links by making the posts impossible to reply to, like, or retweet. Many users took to Twitter to complain about the issue.
Substack responded to the complaints saying they were "actively trying to resolve this and will share updates as additional information becomes available."
Here's a peek into how the social media frenzy between the two platforms unfolded over next couple of days:
How did it all begin?
Substack, the popular subscription newsletter platform for writers, launched a new feature in its app called Notes, last week. Notes seemed fairly similar to the microblogging platform, Twitter, in more ways than one. The 'Notes' feature would allow users to publish small posts about things like “posts, quotes, comments, images, and links,” according to a blog post from Substack co-founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Sethi.
Notes also had two feeds, namely, 'Home' and 'Subscribed', similar to the 'For You' and 'Following' tabs on Twitter. Moreover, on individual posts, one can see familiar icons for likes, replies, and reshares (which Substack will be calling “restacks”). Despite the uncanny similarities, the co-founders of Substack said that owing to the company's subscription-based business model, the platform provides healthier incentives to post quality content rather than things that are optimised to go viral. “Here, people get rewarded for respecting the trust and attention of their audiences,” the blog post read.
Amid complaints from users, Best alleged that Twitter was "throttling links" to Substack. He said that the matter was bigger than Twitter. "It shows why it's so important for writers to own their relationship with their audience," he said.
"We may be a small upstart, but the combined reach of the writers here––both in number, and in cultural impact––is already tremendous. If enough of us choose to play this new game, it will work, and incumbent platforms won't be able to stop it," Best added.
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How did Matt Taibbi get involved?
Matt Taibbi is an American author, journalist, and podcaster. He was chosen by Musk to write segments of the controversial “Twitter Files". The Twitter Files revealed several debates among executives at Twitter over content moderation issues, such as whether Trump had violated the company's content policies with several of his tweets after the January 6 attack, and censoring of reports on Hunter Biden's business in Ukraine.
On Friday Taibbi announced that he was quitting Twitter to protest new restrictions on links to Substack, where he is one of the most popular contributors. In his substack post titled 'The Craziest Friday Ever', he said that he will now be using the new Substack Notes feature. His decision "will come with a price as far as any future Twitter Files reports are concerned", he added.
Citing the reason behind Twitter's wrecking move against Substack, Taibbi alleged that “Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival”.
How did Musk react?
Elon Musk finally broke his silence about the ongoing conflict with the online publishing site Substack and Matt Taibbi on Saturday. “Substack links were never blocked. Matt’s statement is false,” Musk tweeted his response.
Talking about Substack, he said, that the newsletter platform "was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, so their IP address is obviously untrusted". He even said that Taibbi "is/was an employee of Substack".
By Sunday, the Substack links had begun to work again, as the newsletter platform informed the same via its official Twitter handle. "This is the right move for writers, who deserve the freedom to share their work," the tweet read.
Substack also added, "We believe that Twitter and Substack can continue to coexist and complement each other."
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