Elon Musk’s Twitter/X is catching fire after it was discovered to be throttling links to certain sites which Musk has criticized in the past.
Users who clicked links on Twitter to Facebook and the New York Times would see delays of roughly five seconds before they were transferred to those sites. After the Washington Post published a story spotlighting the practice on Tuesday, however, the site seemingly reversed course and did away with the delays.
Other sites impacted by the practice included Bluesky, Substack, Instagram, and Reuters. Musk, who once labeled himself a “free speech absolutist,” has spoken critically of all these sites in the past.
When Fortune reached out for comment on the practice, the company responded with its new auto-reply to all media questions: “We’ll get back to you soon,” which has replaced its poop emoji auto-reply.
The delay was seen on links using the t.co link-shortening service, which allows Twitter/X to monitor where users are going when they click away from the site.
While five seconds in the real world is barely any time at all, it’s an eternity for web surfers. A 2016 Google study of mobile traffic found that 53% of users would give up trying to access a site if the process took longer than three seconds. That makes Musk’s previous criticisms of the affected sites even more notable.
“This is one of those things that seems too crazy to be true, even for Twitter, until you see it inexplicably take five seconds for Chrome to receive 650 bytes of data,” noted Yoel Roth, Twitter’s former head of trust and safety, on Bluesky. “Why annoy users like this?”
Musk, of course, has a history of interfering with users he doesn’t like on the social media site, none more famous than his ban of the jet tracking tool that alerted people to his travel locations.
