✍️ Twitter Declares War On Substack ✍️ — April 10
Elon Musk bans Substack after launch of new rival; Plus 700 new journalism jobs at the likes of the AP, BBC, Bloomberg, Disney, GQ, MTV, Nat Geo, Sky, the NYT, New Yorker and the Washington Post
Hello folks. On Friday, self-described free speech absolutist Elon Musk disabled the ability for Twitter users to like, comment and retweet posts that included links to Substack. The move came after Substack's recent beta-launch of Notes — which you will all have access to very soon — a new social media platform that is similar to Twitter in many ways.
My Twitter activity has ground to a virtual halt over recent months. It started before Musk took over, and stems mainly from an uncertainty of what and who is real. Each time I open Twitter, my inbox is filled with spam bots, and my timeline mostly consists of arguments and outrage. Aside from being terrible for my mental health, it’s not an effective way to promote a publication. It’s sad because I built a huge chunk of this readership using Twitter and in return, they were able to sell ads to me and my followers. But nothing lasts forever.
So going forward, I’ll be focusing my time posting on Notes, and interacting with real readers and writers. I’ll also attempt to message all of my Twitter followers to inform them of the situation. If you receive a Twitter DM from me and are already a subscriber, apologies and feel free to ignore it.
If you’re already a free or paid subscriber, it would be incredibly helpful if you could share ITN with your networks. That way I can continue to build a more stable publication that’s less reliant on unstable social media platforms. 🙏
Today's newsletter will dig deep into what happened on Friday and why, what else Musk has done to alienate users, and whether the era of free social media is over.
Check out last Monday’s newsletter where we looked into the privacy policies of a host of social media companies to see just how different they are to TikTok, in terms of data collection and links to various governments. And Friday’s newsletter where we now have 33 journalism awards, conferences, events and fellowship deadlines on our calendar!
And lastly, if you’re an employer or recruiter with openings now or in the future, fill out this form and have your jobs promoted for as little as $79, or email me at daniellevitt32@gmail.com.
Speak again later this week!
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Preview of New Jobs On The Board
Twitter Declares War On Substack
On Friday I tweeted the link to my newsletter on Big Tech’s privacy policies. When I tried to reply to my tweet with some of the findings of my mini review, I was met with an error message. Twitter often throws up error messages, so I didn’t think much of it. But when I checked back that evening, it appeared that Twitter had disabled its users’ ability to like, comment and retweet any post that included links to Substack.
Twitter has since removed the restrictions, with Elon Musk claiming Substack links were never blocked. I’m not buying it. In December, he blocked users from promoting their presences on other social media platforms including Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post. After a stern backlash, Musk reversed his decision.
Regardless, it was yet another warning shot from Twitter that it isn’t just going to allow other social media platforms to benefit from free advertising and promotion, even though Twitter takes advantage of this same concept. And for what it’s worth, the “Matt” Musk refers to in the above tweet is Matt Taibbi, who runs Racket News on Substack, and is also one of the primary journalists Musk sourced to publish The Twitter Files. Musk’s claim that Taibbi is a Substack employee is false. Substack writers, and by extension Substack themselves, are employed by you, the subscribers.
To make such an accusation is hilariously ironic, considering Musk owns a platform that has benefitted from billions of hours of free labor from its users since its inception in 2006. But Twitter isn’t alone with its recent revenue-making changes, and it could be that we are all playing an active role in how social media works.
End of the Free Social Media Era?
Twitter’s latest move to protect and monetize its brand isn’t isolated. In recent months, Musk has launched a paid-for verification service and has also scrapped free access to its API (Application Programming Interface), a huge decision that will have far-reaching consequences to thousands of third-party companies and apps.
Free API access has long been a feature of tech platforms, with the likes of Salesforce, eBay and Amazon among the first to create an API that meant “commerce and data-sharing were openly accessible for a wide range of customizable uses” in or around 2000, according to Forbes. In other words, the API allowed the likes of Hootsuite to create an innovative app that allowed social media and audience development folks to manage a number of social media accounts all in one place. By charging a minimum of $42,000 per month, Twitter has overnight put thousands of companies at serious risk of going out of business, if it hasn’t already killed them off.
Individually, each move might appear as logical — Twitter is a for-profit business and is entitled to make a profit, rather than lose $4 million per day that Musk claimed last year. But if we look at the decisions of Twitter and other platforms, we could be seeing the end of the free social media era. As Vox senior correspondent Shirin Ghaffary explains, the “free model of social media — subsidized by advertising — is under pressure. Social media companies can’t make as much money off their free users as they used to. A weaker advertising market, privacy restrictions imposed by Apple that make it harder to track users and their preferences, and the perpetual threat of regulation have made it harder for social media apps to sell ads.”
The problem for Musk is that social media has for so long been free for consumers, and with any sudden and fundamental change in how something works, there is no certainty that enough users will accept the changes in order to turn a profit. Unlike Tesla and SpaceX, Musk’s other companies that he also serves as CEO, social media has thrived in large part because of its role as an aggregator, and users’ ability to cross-post to other social media platforms. In this sense, social media is very much an ‘everybody eats’ type of industry.
The hope for Musk and other tech executives is that social media users follow a similar path to that of the news industry. Remember that it wasn’t so long ago that many of the largest news organizations began requiring readers to pay to access their articles. While business models based on free access can still work, some of the largest newspapers in the world are thriving because of people’s willingness to buy subscriptions.
As someone who runs an independent business, I rely on a base level of stability and certainty in order to live with as little stress and anxiety as possible. But being an entrepreneur, there’s a degree of uncertainty that I relish and thrive on. It definitely feels as though we are on the cusp of something novel and special.
Anyway, that’s what I think. What do you think? Leave me a comment below.