Coinspeaker
Twitter Blocks External Links to Threads, CEO Refuses Reports of Traffic Drop
Last week on July 5, Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg launched the Instrgram Threads platform in direct competition with Twitter. Since then, there have been several discussions that Threads has been eating into the market share of Twitter.
With Instagram Threads gaining over 100 million users in less than a week, Twitter seems to be taking some protective measures. This week, Twitter users reported that the platform is selectively blocking links directed to Threads.net website in Twitter searches. Thus, Twitter is making it more difficult for anyone to post links to Threads conversations, on Twitter.
Technologist Andy Baio discovered the alteration on Twitter when he tried searching for tweets using the “url:threads.net” operator but found no results. Normally, this operator would display tweets containing links to the specified website, and there are numerous tweets with threads.net links available now.
Along with Baio, several others have noticed the change and tweeted about the same. However, it’s not clear as to when the block began, since Twitter hasn’t been much open about it. This isn’t the first time though that Twitter has been blocking competitor’s websites.
After the introduction of Substack Notes, a discussion feature by the newsletter platform Substack, Twitter started censoring the associated links. This censorship prevented users from replying, liking, or retweeting those posts. However, the current block on Threads does not extend to those restrictions, at least not at this point.
Twitter CEO Responds to Reports of Traffic Drop after the Launch of Threads
Ever since Threads launched, there have been reports that Twitter’s traffic has been on a severe decline. Within the first two days of the launch of Threads, Twitter traffic dropped by 5% as per the web analytics platform SimilarWeb. Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince also tweeted that Twitter’s traffic has been dropping citing a graph of DNS ranking over time.
Twitter traffic tanking. https://t.co/KSIXqNsu40 pic.twitter.com/mLlbuXVR6r
— Matthew Prince ? (@eastdakota) July 9, 2023
Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino has responded to the reports stating otherwise. In her recent tweet, Yaccarino noted:
“Don’t want to leave you hanging by a thread… but Twitter, you really outdid yourselves! Last week we had our largest usage day since February. There’s only ONE Twitter. You know it. I know it.”
However, one must note that the CEO hasn’t shared any specific metrics for comparison. Some recent set of troubles at Twitter has been benefitting its rival. Mastodon, a Twitter rival and open-source platform, reported a strong surge in traffic recently.
Twitter Blocks External Links to Threads, CEO Refuses Reports of Traffic Drop
