Twitter has started marking links to Substack as unsafe. If you click on a link on Twitter with substack.com in the URL, Twitter will display a separate notice warning you that “Twitter or our partners have identified the link you are trying to access as potentially spam or unsafe.”
Don’t be alarmed: the links we’ve checked appear to be perfectly safe. Instead, this notice appears to be the latest hostile move by Twitter towards Substack after the email newsletter platform announced its own Twitter-like “Notes” feature on Wednesday.
On Thursday, Twitter stopped people who use Substack from embedding tweets in their stories. Then, on Thursday night or early Friday, Twitter began blocking engagement on tweets that contained links to Substack; users couldn’t like or retweet them, but could quote retweet them. Then, on Friday morning, Twitter applied those same restrictions to tweets from the official Substack account.
While those moves are clearly hostile, I would classify the unsafe warning as downright aggressive. Twitter URL Policy It hasn’t changed since 2020, according to the last updated note on the page, and the Substack site seems to be working as usual, so it’s hard to say what justification Twitter is using for the warning. CEO Elon Musk hasn’t tweeted anything about Substack recently, and when asked for comment, Twitter’s press email automatically responded with a poop emoji, which he’s been doing since mid-March.
The elephant in the room is Substack’s Notes feature, which adds very Twitter-like elements to the newsletter platform. Matt Taibbi, a journalist who has a history reporting stories for Musk, said friday that an unspecified party told him that “Twitter is upset about the new Substack Notes feature, which they see as a hostile rival.” He also notes that he was “given the option to post my articles on Twitter instead of Substack.”
In December, Musk said he considered “relentless advertising by competitors” a violation of policy and blocked links shared to Instagram, Mastodon, Facebook and others. However, those restrictions were later removed. He may have decided to bring it back now that he feels Substack is trying to compete with Twitter, though it’s worth noting that, for now at least, he can still tweet a Substack link. Anyone trying to follow it will only have to click on the warning to access the content.
Substack did not immediately respond to the edgerequest for comments on the warning. However, its founders have recently spoken out about how Twitter is treating their platform.
