Twitter Appears to Have Deployed Anti-Substack Measures and It’s Not Going Well

Substack announces Notes, Twitter blocks embeds

Twitter appears to have identified Substack as a direct competitor following the announcement this week — shared on Twitter — of a new product launch. As the website under Elon Musk‘s leadership did with the suddenly popular Mastodon, Substack links were limited on Twitter, and, more significantly, the embedding of tweets in Substack articles was interrupted.

Users of Twitter and Substack — a group that prominently includes Twitter Files journalists Matt Taibbi and Bari Weiss — noticed the change in the days after Tuesday’s announcement of Substack Notes.

https://twitter.com/mattyglesias/status/1644334044316934145

According to reports, the problem with embedding tweets in Substack articles came first, and the errors in tweets that have Substack links showed up soon after, when Twitter users were complaining about the first thing.

Gizmodo reports the problem with link sharing on Twitter appears to affect only new tweets:

In Gizmodo’s own tests, we found that some older Substack links posted on Thursday or earlier are still fine. There’s also no issue we could find with Substack links that do not contain the word “Substack” in the name. However, trying to retweet or comment on a post containing a link with Substack in the URL from Friday morning onward results in an error message.

Substack is investigating the embedding issue.

Currently, when trying to embed a tweet in Substack a user will get this warning:

When attempting to like or retweet new tweets with substack links, it produces this message:

Substack’s Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie, and Jairaj Seth gave a statement to The Verge and other outlets on the issue.

We’re disappointed that Twitter has chosen to restrict writers’ ability to share their work. Writers deserve the freedom to share links to Substack or anywhere else. This abrupt change is a reminder of why writers deserve a model that puts them in charge, that rewards great work with money, and that protects the free press and free speech. Their livelihoods should not be tied to platforms where they don’t own their relationship with their audience, and where the rules can change on a whim.

The new Substack Notes is just the latest in a long list of websites or services that, whether explicitly saying so or not, seek to emulate or reproduce the dynamic that has made Twitter one of the epicenters of pop culture and especially journalism over the last decade.

Like other such products, the resemblance is striking.

The number one feature that past Twitter competitors have lacked, to the crushing of their aspirations at dominance, is to have their version of a tweet be embeddable in a variety of formats across the web. A company would be hard-pressed to find a more effective method of viral marketing than literally being the way things go viral.

There is an entire genre of media, a cottage industry really, based on sharing a series of embedded tweets, whether joined as a thread or joined by theme. Mediaite has such articles like many other sites, and there are entire websites that are strictly that model.

Journalists embed tweets in articles at major prestige media publications, bloggers embed tweets in their posts, and Substack writers embed them in their articles.

Or they did, anyway, until this change. At this time there is no word from Twitter or Elon Musk on the issue, or whether it’s permanent or will be blamed on some “error” or oversight.

But an inability to embed tweets in Substack articles and emails would be, based on historic performance and general consensus, a disastrous move by Twitter that would hurt Musk’s brand much more than Substack’s.