A few days ago, Twitter users who wanted to put in links to the Substack newsletter service found they could not retweet, reply to, or like those kinds of tweets. Now, it appears that the issues are now over. Engadget reports that those functions on Twitter are back for people who put in Substack links. The official Substack Twitter feed posted on Saturday night that "the suppression of Substack publications on Twitter appears to be over."
We’re glad to see that the suppression of Substack publications on Twitter appears to be over. 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 results for "newsletter" instead.
Journalist Matt Taibbi claimed on his Twitter feed that Twitter shut down the redistribution of Substack links because the service announced Substack Notes earlier in the week. This will be a Twitter-like service, and that may have displeased Twitter CEO Elon Musk. In his own post, he claimed that Substack"s tweets were not blocked, which is misleading since tweets with those links could not be retweeted or replied to. He also claimed Taibbi was an employee of Substack, which is not true (Taibbi has a Substack newsletter, where he gets money from its subscribers).
Musk also claimed Substack "was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone." He offered no evidence of this, and Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, denied this in a Substack Notes post shared on The Verge. He claimed that Substack "has used the Twitter API, for years, to help writers" and said they would be "happy to address any issues" Twitter might have.
This is not the only controversy that Twitter is dealing with this week. A few days ago, it labeled the Twitter account for National Public Radio (NPR) as "state-affiliated media", In fact, in NPR"s own story about the situation, it"s a non-profit group that gets less than one percent of its funds from federal sources.
That label was removed from the NPR account this weekend, but Twitter placed a "government-funded media" notice on the BBC"s Twitter feed. The BBC"s story points out that the broadcaster is actually funded by UK residents via a license fee. It also points out that other Twitter accounts run by the BBC but have larger followings, like its Sports and News accounts, don"t have that same label.