People who use the SubStack app were in for a shock today when they attempted to share links on Twitter. They saw an error message whenever interacting with any tweets that had a link to SubStack. This included retweets, replies and likes. The message clearly mentioned that “Twitter had disabled some activities related to this tweet”. Even things like TweetDeck have been impacted too!
Although you can still post links to Substack on Twitter, it won’t do much because Twitter might be stopping people from doing that. This could be a mistake, or maybe it has something to do with the fact that Twitter doesn’t like Similar because they recently unveiled something that is the same as what Twitter does. In addition, Twitter has tried blocking links to other social media platforms before, and even Elon Musk (who runs the company) bans journalists who talk about his company.
The people who created Substack were not happy when Twitter restricted the ability of writers to share links there. They said it made them realise why writers should be in charge of their own work, rather than somebody else. They want writers to have the freedom to share links wherever they want and not be limited.
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There might be another reason why Substack had troubles with Twitter. Recently, Twitter released a new policy that requires users to pay a high amount (42,000 dollars per month) for their services. So if lots of people linked from Substack content to Twitter and Substack didn’t want to pay this big fee, then it could have caused an issue similar to what happened between Twitter and the New York Times.
Substack is looking into some recently imposed restrictions and will tell us more when they know it. They wrote a blog post saying that these changes may have been made in error and that maybe the way the internet works needs to change. We asked Substack for more information and we’ll update this post if anything changes or if functions start working again.
