The success of Meta’s alternative to Twitter is not liking Musk at all. We already saw how he threatened Instagram with a possible lawsuit for allegedly having copied functions from his social network. Now a new report The Verge indicates that Elon Musk could be applying a censorship to the links of Threads in Twitter searches.
The aforementioned source ensures that, when searching for links that lead to Threads profiles, Twitter shows blank results, ensuring that there are no results. The latter is quite curious, taking into account that since the launch of the social network many users have taken the opportunity to share links that lead to their profiles and thus get new followers. Could it be a possible censorship of Threads by Elon Musk?
While searching for the term “url:threads.net” has the same effects as above, the situation is slightly different when simply searching for “threads.net”. On this last case, Twitter shows results not related to Meta’s social network. On the other hand, even when tweets that talk about the service do appear, no results containing links emerge.
As commented from the aforementioned medium, there is a way to find the links to Threads, however, it requires a bit of creativity. The idea is to write “url:”threads net”, leaving a space where the point of the URL should go. Of course, this is an extra step that is not usually considered by users, and that makes the process of finding new people to follow through Twitter difficult on the new social network.
Is this an intentional censorship of Threads by Elon Musk? The results are not conclusive
for now it is still not clear if this is an intentional censorship of Threads by Musk, since at the moment it only affects searches on Twitter. However, if so, it would not be the first time that the tycoon participates in practices of this style. A couple of months ago we already saw how his social network limited the visibility of tweets with links to Substack, Notion’s service for newsletter.
The same thing happened with Mastodon at the end of 2022. At that time, the social network recently bought by Elon Musk suspended the official account of the serviceand also blocked links that redirected to their servers.
Should Musk’s censorship of Threads in Twitter searches prove true, it wouldn’t come as a surprise either. The tycoon has been quite critical of Mark Zuckerberg’s new social networksomething that has led him to insult him in recent tweets, and even to propose a contest to “measure their penises”, in an attempt to solve their problems.
Meanwhile, we are still waiting for the possible physical confrontation between the two billionaires. Perhaps in this way they will end up settling their private affairs that they make more and more public.