SAN FRANCISCO — On Wednesday, newsletter service Substack announced that it had created a competitor to Twitter. On Thursday, Twitter blocked Substack writers from sharing tweets in their newsletters. And on Friday, Twitter took steps to block Substack newsletters from circulating on the platform.
Twitter’s move to squash an upstart was an abrupt departure from normal behavior among internet companies and publishers. It also provided more water for critics who say that while Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, has often praised the importance of free speech, he hasn’t shied away from restricting competitors and content he doesn’t like.
The new fight with a young company is the latest controversy in Musk’s chaotic Twitter ownership, which he acquired about six months ago. He has laid off more than 75 percent of his employees, has been sued by business landlords for not paying office rent and has lost advertisers.
While Musk has long clashed with mainstream media, targeting Substack hits hard for freelance writers, some of whom rely on Twitter to drive readers to their work.
“This is a big drawback,” said Hunter Harris, a writer who distributes his newsletter, Hang, in substack. “It’s incredibly petty.”
Substack founders Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi said in a statement that they were “disappointed” by Twitter’s decision to stifle engagement with any tweet that included a Substack link.
“Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else,” they said. “This abrupt change is a reminder why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, rewards great work with money, and protects freedom of the press and speech.”
Musk did not respond to a request for comment.
Twitter and Substack share a major investor, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, which could be called upon to act as an arbitrator in the dispute. A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz, which led a $65 million investment round in Substack in 2021 and invested $400 million in Musk’s Twitter last year, did not respond to a request for comment.
Substack’s new feature, called Notes, mimics Twitter in several ways. It allows users to post short updates and allows other people to like, repost, or reply to them. Changes made by Twitter on Friday meant that Twitter users could still share links to Substack newsletters, but they blocked other users from liking or sharing those links.
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Before Musk acquired it, Twitter sometimes restricted likes and retweets as a way to prevent content that violated its policies from spreading widely on the platform. The measure was used to limit scope of former President Donald J. Trump’s tweets in which he made false claims about how votes would be counted in the 2020 election.
Twitter has been a major distribution outlet for Substack authors, many of whom are independent from traditional news outlets and rely on subscriptions to make money.
Some of Substack’s most popular writers have been vocal supporters of Musk, who gave them special access to analyze and publish the “Twitter Files,” internal communications that the billionaire said showed the biases of Twitter’s previous management. One such writer, Matt Taibbi, said in a tweet on Friday that he was “alarmed” and that he would be leaving Twitter due to its Substack restrictions and posting to Substack Notes on his behalf.
The changes outraged writers who use Twitter and Substack to distribute their work. “I can’t explain how absurd and silly this is,” Rohit Krishnan, who writes the newsletter. strange loop canonwrote in a cheep. “Not to mention mean and vindictive.”
Ms Harris said that while Twitter did not bring significant traffic to her newsletter, the restrictions penalized her readers who wanted to share links to or discuss her work on Twitter. Preventing Substack writers from including tweets in their newsletters also took proper credit away from Twitter users, she added.
“Any Twitter alternative would be great,” Harris said of Substack’s move to create a competitor. “I want another place like Twitter other than Twitter.”
Other writers said Musk’s latest move contradicted his statements about allowing free speech on Twitter.
“By cutting off access to Substack, Elon is banning access to free and highly informative content on the Internet.” saying Simon Rosenberg, who writes a Newsletter on politics “It’s censorship of the worst kind.”
The Substack rampage isn’t the first time Musk has blocked competing services from being shared on Twitter. In December, he suspended Twitter users, including several journalists, for linking to Mastodon after a Mastodon user shared public information about the location of Musk’s private plane.
Continued to ban users share links to Facebook, Instagram and several other social media companies, but changed course after backlash. Under pressure from his supporters who saw the move as a departure from his free-speech principles, Musk said in December that he would step down as Twitter chief executive once he found a replacement. Musk hasn’t yet.
Musk has also escalated his longstanding feud with the mainstream media. Last Saturday, he revoked The New York Times checkmark, which had set his Twitter account apart from imitators. Musk had said Twitter would start removing verification badges starting April 1, but most verified accounts kept their verification marks.
On Wednesday, Twitter added a hashtag to NPR’s Twitter account, calling it “state-sponsored media.” The hashtag, which the platform used in the past to identify propaganda outlets, sparked a backlash from press freedom organizations. In emails to an NPR reporter On Wednesday, Musk acknowledged that the label “might not be accurate,” adding: “We should fix it.”
This week, Musk made a series of inexplicable changes to Twitter, replacing the company’s bird logo for a few days with the image of a Shiba Inu dog associated with the Dogecoin cryptocurrency.
On Tuesday, the company also covered the letter “w” in the name “Twitter” on a large public billboard outside its San Francisco headquarters, in what some observers assumed was a vulgar joke.
