X slows down access to competitors, news sites

San Francisco, Aug 16: X, formerly known as Twitter, has limited traffic to certain websites disliked by its owner, Elon Musk, by slowing down the speed of accessing links.

The websites included The New York Times, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, Substack, among others, reports TechCrunch, citing sources.

On Tuesday, the platform seemed to be correcting this delayed access to websites.

There was a five-second delay in the web pages loading after clicking on links to these websites on X.

In the past, Musk had publicly attacked each of these websites.

Musk and X were potentially taking away traffic and ad revenue from these companies, by delaying traffic to the websites.

Users can become impatient when content doesn’t load within a second or two, which can have an impact on the traffic to a website.

“A quick test showed that other major news organisations and websites, such as YouTube and Fox News, are unaffected,” the report said.

The platform’s former head of trust and safety posted on Bluesky that the delays seemed to be “one of those things that seems too crazy to be true, even for Twitter, until you see it inexplicably take 5 seconds for Chrome to receive 650 bytes of data”.

He also noted that “UX research on web performance suggests that even a 1 second delay is enough for people to start to context switch, which increases bounce rates and decreases time spent on the linked site. Delays are annoying enough, even subconsciously, to drive people away”.

Additionally, Meta Founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg responded with a “thinking face emoji” to a Threads post which mentioned the throttling issue.

Meanwhile, many users on X, including social media consultant Matt Navarra, reported that the company has finally killed free access to the social media dashboard application for management, XPro (formerly known as TweetDeck).

The platform first announced this transition on July 4 and said that it would happen “in 30 days”.