X, formerly known as Twitter, is throttling the traffic to several websites, including the New York Times, Facebook, Instagram, Reuters and Threads, The Washington Post reported on Tuesday. The move, according to the report, seems to be aimed at the websites that have been attacked in the past by X’s owner, Elon Musk.
Clicking a link on X to one of the affected websites resulted in a delay of about five seconds before the webpage loaded, the report said, citing tests it conducted.
By late Tuesday afternoon, X appeared to have eliminated the delay. Another report by Reuters said that when contacted for comment, X confirmed the delay was removed but did not elaborate.
However, some websites like The Washington Post, Fox News and YouTube did not face such delays in the redirection.
Musk, who bought Twitter in October, has previously lashed out at news organizations and journalists who have reported critically on his companies, which include Tesla and SpaceX. Twitter has previously prevented users from posting links to competing social media platforms.
A user on Hacker News, a tech forum, posted about the delay earlier on Tuesday and wrote that X began delaying links to The New York Times on August 4. On that day, Musk criticised the publication’s coverage of South Africa and accused it of supporting calls for genocide.
Notably, online companies invest millions of dollars into ensuring their websites open as quickly as possible. Most companies know that even tiny delays can lead their traffic to plunge as users grow impatient with the delay and go elsewhere.
A 2016 study by Google on mobile traffic said that 53 per cent of users abandoned a website if it took longer than three seconds to load. X has also throttled traffic to Bluesky, an X rival that has Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on its board.
A spokesperson for The New York Times told Reuters that it had not received an explanation from X about the link delay.
“While we don’t know the rationale behind the application of this time delay, we would be concerned by targeted pressure applied to any news organisation for unclear reasons,” the spokesperson said.
Mastodon and Substack were the other websites affected by the delays.
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