A few days ago, Twitter users who wanted to link to the Substack newsletter service found that they could not retweet, reply to, or like such tweets. Now it seems that things are over. Engadget reports that those functions are back on Twitter for people who post substack links. The official Substack Twitter feed “The suppression of substack posts on Twitter appears to be coming to an end,” posted Saturday night.
We’re glad to see that the suppression of substack publications on Twitter seems to be fading. This is the right move for writers, who deserve the freedom to share their work.
— Substack (@SubstackInc) April 9, 2023
It’s not all good news, as Engadget also reports that people who search for “Substack” on Twitter get “newsletter” results instead.
Journalist Matt Tabby claimed on his Twitter feed That Twitter has stopped redistributing substack links since the service announced a substack notice earlier in the week. It would be a Twitter-like service, and may have angered Twitter CEO Elon Musk. In his own post, he claimed that the substack’s tweets were not blocked, which is misleading because tweets containing these links cannot be retweeted or replied to. He also claimed that Taibi was an employee of Substack, which is not true (Taibi owns the Substack newsletter, where he receives money from his subscribers).
Musk also claimed that Substack was “attempting to download a large portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap his Twitter clone.” He offered no evidence of this, and Substack CEO Chris Best denied it. The Substake Notes post was shared on The Verge.. He claimed that Substack had “used the Twitter API for years” to help writers and said he would be “happy to fix any Twitter issues”.
This isn’t the only controversy Twitter is dealing with this week. A few days ago, he labeled National Public Radio’s (NPR) Twitter account as “state-affiliated media,” in fact, in NPR’s own story on the situationIt is a non-profit group that receives less than one percent of its funding from federal sources.
The label was removed from the NPR account later this week, but Twitter placed a “government-funded media” notice on the BBC’s Twitter feed. BBC story It states that broadcasters are originally funded by UK residents through license fees. It also noted that other Twitter accounts run by the BBC, but with more followers than its sports and news accounts, do not have the same label.
