Elon Musk’s Twitter, now rebranded as X, has candidly acknowledged its potential bias, a confession that comes amidst mounting accusations of deliberately slowing down websites criticized by its billionaire owner.
What Happened: On Thursday, the official channel of X posted, “we might be biased, but this platform is pretty cool,” in response to a glowing endorsement from a graphic designer at Dogecoin DOGE/USD who goes by the name Doge Designer on the platform.
In their endorsement, Doge Designer praised X for its benefits to creators of all kinds, from bloggers and gamers to influencers and shitposters, highlighting the potential profit these accounts can generate by sharing content on the platform.
The commendatory post from X came just days after the platform faced accusations of deliberately limiting traffic to websites that its billionaire owner had criticized.
Users reported experiencing significantly slower loading speeds when accessing links from several websites, including the New York Times, Reuters, Meta Platforms Inc’s META Instagram, Facebook and Threads, Bluesky, and Substack.
Curiously, other prominent websites like YouTube and Fox News remained unaffected. This selective targeting of slowdowns raised questions about the role of personal biases in shaping X’s operations.
Why It’s Important: After announcing the controversial removal of the “Block” feature and “Tweepcred” system, Musk now plans to strip out the headline and text from news links, leaving only the lead image.
Simply put, anyone sharing a news link on X, whether individual users or publishers, will need to add text alongside the links they share manually. Without this addition, the post will display only an image and the URL, potentially confusing readers.
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