X has slowed the speed of access to connections to websites that its owner, Elon Musk, does not like.
San Francisco, Aug. 16: X, formerly known as Twitter, has slowed down the speed of access to links on websites that its owner, Elon Musk, disapproves of.
TechCrunch, citing sources, says the sites affected include The New York Times, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, and Substack.
The platform appeared to be fixing the sluggish loading times for webpages on Tuesday.
When I clicked on links to these websites on X, there was a five-second lag in page loading time.
Musk has already made public criticisms of all of these outlets.
By delaying traffic to the websites, Musk and X may have cost these businesses viewers and advertising dollars.
When pages take longer than a few seconds to load, visitors may leave in search of sites that don’t make them wait.
The article claimed that tests conducted on other big news organisations and websites including YouTube and Fox News revealed that they were not affected.
The former head of trust and safety for the platform commented on Bluesky that the lags were “one of those things that seems too crazy to be true, even for Twitter,” until users saw that it took Chrome five seconds to receive 650 bytes of data.
In addition, he mentioned that “UX research on web performance suggests that even a 1 second delay is enough for people to start to context switch,” which leads to higher bounce rates and less time spent on the linked site. People will leave if there is a delay, even if they don’t realise it.
In addition, Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg replied to a Threads post about the throttling problem with a “thinking face emoji.”
In the meantime, numerous X users, like social media strategist Matt Navarra, have stated that the business has discontinued providing free access to XPro (previously TweetDeck), a social media dashboard programme for management.
Initially announced on July 4 with a “in 30 days” deadline, the platform has now completed the switch.
