The ongoing escalating feud between Twitter and Substack appears to be getting stronger as this weekend users discovered that searches for the blogging site were being redirected to “newsletter” instead.
This appears to be yet another attempt by the Elon Musk-owned social networking site to wean users away from Substack, as the former appears to be at war with the newsletter platform. Twitter’s recent decision to redirect searches for “Substack” to “Newsletter” has sparked controversy and raised concerns about freedom of expression.
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Mashable’s attempt to request a comment from Twitter was immediately responded to with a poop emoji, an automated response Musk implemented after tampering with the communications department. Substack also did not immediately respond to Mashable’s request for comment on the situation.
Twitter flags Substack links as unsafe as row continues
Even worse, the implementation of this functionality is implemented in the simplest way possible, with redirects even obscuring the word “subpackage” in the URL link. meaning Search for articles From Mashable or other sites around Substack will not work when searching on Twitter. This has many users on the site concerned, especially since one of Musk’s most important agendas after buying Twitter was absolute freedom of speech.
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The feud between Twitter and Substack seems to have started after the latter announced a new feature called Substack Notes. The feature is a quick, Twitter-like social media feed that only exists in the realm of the newsletter platform. The feature is not in direct competition with Twitter at all, and in fact, the platform even had its own newsletter feature(Opens in a new tab) It quickly closed after Musk took over.
Since then, Musk decided to block interactions on tweets that include links to Substack and also removed Substack’s ability to embed tweets on his platform. The feud has gotten so bad that Matt Taibi, a Twitter profile journalist hired by Musk, appears to be over as well.
Since the billionaire’s takeover in 2022, Twitter has faced a host of challenges, including waning interest from advertisers, a faltering paid subscription service, strained relationship with journalists and news outlets, and deteriorating partnerships with critical users and third-party developers. Collectively, these issues contributed to the social media giant’s downward spiral. If anything, this latest drama with Substack was inevitable.
Substack’s official Twitter account tweeted Saturday night that the crackdown on its posts seemed to be over:
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However, as of this writing, Twitter is still redirecting Substack search attempts. So it seems that this one-sided war is still going on.