Where Elon Screws One, He Screws All
Musk's squabble with Substack threatens to make Twitter irrelevant to the thinking public
It’s a short one today, folks: I have a lot on my plate this week, including taping podcasts with political theorist Nancy Fraser and historian Matt Dallek. But if you have a friend who would like a taste of what this newsletter is like, please:
Late last week, I received a Twitter notification from a reader who had discovered this newsletter on Twitter. “I can’t like, retweet or reply to this,” they wrote about this post, which should have gone viral on #academicTwitter, “so I am quote tweeting it instead.” But, unfortunately, they were right: none of the functions were working.
Those of us who pay attention to Twitter soon learned that, in a fit of pique, Elon Musk had ordered the code that connects Twitter to Substack severed. It began with the inability to directly embed tweets in a Substack post and expanded from there. Why? Because Substack had rolled out Notes in Beta, a Twitter clone that is not only better than any of the other Twitter clones that have been rolled out but one that creates a seamless conversation between posts and discussion.
As Substack explained it in a blog post:
The Substack model is thriving. The proof is that the imitations are failing and the incumbents are resisting.
For example, today Twitter started blocking links to Substack. We hope this action was made in error and is only temporary. Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else. However, even if this change is not temporary, it is a reminder of why cracks are starting to show in the internet’s legacy business models. When it comes to any of the other large platforms, the rules are the same. If writers and creators don’t own their relationships with their audiences, they’re not in control.
This writer- and reader-first model represents the future of the internet. Any platform that benefits from writers’ and creators’ work but that doesn’t give them control over their relationships will inevitably wonder how to respond to the platforms that do.
Musk initially claimed that he was punishing Substack for stealing proprietary code (this is probably false), and then denied he was blocking Substack writers. This may have been technically true, Matt Novak writes at Forbes, but
In reality, Twitter has put up numerous roadblocks for anyone trying to visit Substack posts, even displaying a warning that links to Substack may be unsafe.
As you can see below, the warning says Substack may contain malicious links that try to steal your personal information or may even have violent or misleading content.
It beggars everyone’s patience to talk about how broken things are at Twitter: people locked out of their accounts for no reason, accounts hacked beyond repair that have to be abandoned and rebuilt from scratch, and people I blocked years ago suddenly showing up in my feed unbidden and unblocked. Mainly, these things can probably be attributed to the fact that a sprawling, global platform is being run by a skeleton force responding to the whims of someone who doesn’t understand social media in general or Twitter in particular.
But then there are the Deliberate Things, which also come from the top, and here I can only speak from what I have observed. For example, I have never seen so much spam in my messages. Worse, as a legacy blue check and Super Tweeter, I realized by early January that followers were mysteriously disappearing under the new regime. At first, I thought they were just bots being trimmed out of my account (fine!); as my numbers dropped further, I was less sure.
But what was really mysterious was how many fewer people I usually interact with were showing up in my feed. This happened on Facebook years ago and caused me to stop using Big Blue for anything but posting Substack articles that they won’t distribute unless I pay to promote them.
But on the new Elonized Twitter? I was—and I am not exaggerating—getting a couple dozen tweets a day from novelist and super-Tweeter Alexander Chee (we do follow each other). But I didn’t see anyone I had always interacted with or followed. No #twitterstorians, no Philadelphia sports chatter, and none of the conservative pundits I follow to keep up with right-wing chatter. The acerbic young historian David Austin Walsh? It was as if he had vanished from the face of the earth.
Even worse, I was tweeting into a void: few retweets, follows, or even wrangling with trolls.
I smelled a rat. So I talked myself into paying for my blue check—after all, it cost less than my subscription to the New Yorker, less than half of what I pay for The New York Times every year. It was tax deductible. And I needed to know: was my account being deliberately screwed around with?
Yes. I am 99% sure that it was. As soon as I paid? Everything was back to normal. Everything.
Furthermore, the story was in the data I now had access to. Near the beginning of November, shortly after Elon took over, I began to see a slide in engagement. That slide became an avalanche by December—and by the first of the year? My engagement was half what it had been.
As soon as I paid? Engagement went up at a 45-degree angle.
So what Elon has done with Substack does not surprise me, nor does it particularly worry me. I can take an extra few minutes before posting, create a tiny.url, and put that up: this seems to evade the Twitter ban. But the truth is, only 5% of my subscribers come from Twitter anyway.
That’s not true of some of the bigger Substackers. I think Elon may be trying to demonstrate to some of the big legacy media, like the New York Times, that he can bury them if he wants. What this all shows is that social media is in desperate need of regulation. It isn’t just data now—it’s the capacity to shape the information environment and steer users away from reliable sources.
And as an aside? Substack Notes is a beautiful thing. Trust me. We creators are having such fun with them. And one of the reasons to subscribe to this newsletter is that when they are rolled out to the general public, you will love them too.
Short takes:
Instead of doing actual work, the House Judiciary Committee has decided to come to New York City to troll New York District Attorney Alvin Bragg in revenge for Donald J. Trump’s indictment and arraignment. “The House Judiciary Committee will hear from `victims’ of Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s policies during a hearing in New York next month,” according to Steven Nelson at The New York Post. “The source said that `victims’ of Bragg’s `failure to prosecute’ are expected to be witnesses, though they were not immediately able to share the expected witness list.” (April 10, 2023)
You may have seen a lot of action on social media about Matthew J. Kacsmaryk, a federal judge in Texas, who ruled that the FDA had no authority to approve mifepristone, and suspended access to it. This was quickly followed by a competing ruling, issued by Judge Thomas O. Rice of the Eastern District of Washington State, that has preserved access, meaning that reproductive freedom will once again go to the Supreme Court. But “Kacsmaryk’s unprecedented ruling,” legal historian Mary Ziegler writes in The Atlantic, “is not just a bid to block access to abortion pills. It is an open invitation to anti-abortion-rights groups to use the Comstock Act—a law passed 150 years ago and rarely enforced in the past century—to seek a nationwide federal ban on all abortions. If revived, the Comstock Act, passed 150 years ago, and invalidated by a series of Supreme Court decisions, would criminalize a range of information and commercial products that have implications for sexual and reproductive freedom. (April 9, 2023)
If you have noticed similarities in anti-trans and anti-abortion tactics, you aren’t a conspiracy theorist—you are right. As Irin Carmon explains in New York Magazine, “the same small group of people who have made abortion almost impossible in swaths of the country (and aren’t done yet) are now trying to ban trans health care. So far, the same playbook — which comes down to fomenting moral panic around the most vulnerable and co-opting progressive tropes to help fuel it — is working well for them.” (April 4, 2023)
Notice he's on a "libertarian" tear labeling NPR and PBS "government funded" but has yet to label Fox "Australian right wing billionaire entertainment" - let's ask him why?
Admittedly, I am not a tech savvy person but do read a lot, many stubstacks these days. I am frustrated that I need to pay to read what was normally free to readers. If I pay for what I read I could read practically nothing due to the cumulative fees that would be required.
When the internet first caught on it was advertising that paid for most sites and allowed for a 'free' internet. I participated in the political efforts for a free internet and after several years the FCC finally agreed to this standard; ie, the internet was a utility like the phone. You paid a monthy fee and had free access just as you can make phone calls without the phone company interring with all these add on fees. Why isn't there that movement again? What happened to people's consciousness that we are being totally commodizied as resources for profit. I wonder how soon it will be before I can no longer read the numerous sites that I do. What will then allow me to inform myself of what is happening outside the MSM propaganda!