In news that will be of no surprise, a new report has found that X is throttling links to rival social media apps, as well as news outlets that owner Elon Musk doesn’t like, which could be of relevance for your posting strategy in the app.

For the most part, it’s just more shenanigans from the reformed Twitter app, which continues to make loud proclamations about free speech, despite not supporting such in its actions. But I guess it’s “free speech” from Elon’s unique perspective. And while his stance against feeding traffic to competitors does make some business sense, there appears to be a disconnect between being a “free speech absolutist” and controlling what does and doesn’t get reach in his app.

But I digress.

As noted, from a social media marketing perspective, it’s important to note the changes, which could have an impact on your approach.

First off, X is now seemingly delaying load times for links to The New York Times and Reuters, among other media outlets that have been regularly singled out for criticism by Elon in his posts.

As explained by The Washington Post:

“The delay affected the t.co domain, a link-shortening service that X uses to process every link posted to the website. Traffic is routed through the domain, allowing X to track, and, in this case, throttle, activity to the target website, potentially taking away traffic and ad revenue from businesses Musk personally dislikes.”

Following the publication of these reports, there have since been updated accounts that the delays have been removed, though X has offered no official explanation as to why the delay was ever present, or whether it’s been permanently lifted.

So it may be gone now, but it could be worth noting that links to publishers that Elon himself doesn’t like may not perform as well as others.

A brief overview of publishers that Elon has directly criticized of late:

There are numerous others, but as a guide note, based on recent, explicit criticisms, these ones could be in Elon’s firing line for restrictions, if X is looking to maintain such moving forward.

This is also in addition to its recent algorithm updates, which restrict the reach of all posts that include external links. Some social media managers are experimenting with ways to get around this, by, for example, posting a description of the article, along with an image, in the first post of a thread, then adding a linked post with the article URL in a reply beneath. That could lead to better reach, as it includes an image post and a reply, both of which are being amplified by the algorithm, but there’s no definitive evidence on this as yet (we’re experimenting with this approach at SMT).

Another key consideration which may be of more significant concern to social media managers, however, is that links to rival social platforms are also being restricted.

This has not been lifted, and has been confirmed by Musk. All links to rival social media platforms within X posts, including Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Bluesky and Substack, are all being restricted to some degree.

As noted in this tweet, examining the latest X algorithm code, even untagged mentions of rival apps could be hit with a reach penalty, so you probably want to avoid linking to other apps where you can.

Yeah, it’s not exactly free and open, though as noted, giving what Elon sees as free promotion to rivals is also, understandably, not ideal for X. But you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say that X is the most free speech-aligned app, then restrict the reach to certain outlets and URLs.

That’s exactly what the X team has criticized former Twitter management for, yet it’s now doing the exact same thing, just with a different bias in approach.

Not that it matters. Elon’s dedicated fans will defend him to the nth degree, no matter what he does, while his detractors will remain in opposition along similar lines. What really matters is the user experience, and throttling rivals and third-party developers is probably not the best approach on this front.

But Elon says that the platform is seeing record usage, and that advertisers are coming back as a result.

Maybe that’s true. I don’t know, because X doesn’t share any official data.

But we’ll find out soon, one way or another.