First Taibbi gets brutally handbagged by the generally toothless Mehdi Hasan, and then his Emperor-Employer betrays him?…
So hold on, literally the day after he told me that likes and admires Elon Musk, specially for Musk’s handling of Twitter, and refused point blank to criticize Elon Musk, Taibbi is quitting Musk’s Twitter? You literally can’t make this stuff up. https://t.co/lbhKx6RFkw
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) April 7, 2023
😎
"Matt Taibbi, one of Elon Musk’s handpicked disseminators of the so-called 'Twitter Files,' informed his readers on Friday that he was ditching Twitter after the Chief Twit restricted links to Substack this week." https://t.co/QMvFxHOwho
— Jay Rosen (@jayrosen_nyu) April 7, 2023
It could have started as another one of the Apartheid Princeling’s jeenyus business decisions: SubStack wants to compete with Twitter, so SubStack must be unplatformed, whatever the cost to Twitter:
… On Friday, Twitter began preventing users from engaging with tweets that contained links to Substack articles, blocking any likes, retweets and comments from these posts. Additionally, users were unable to pin any tweets to the top of their profile if they included a Substack link.
It had been widely speculated that Twitter disabled Substack from the site because the online publishing platform had recently launched a new feature called Substack Notes, which provides a Twitter-like feed to authors and subscribers of the newsletter site…
Since Twitter has been a major platform for Substack writers to share their newsletters and articles, and Musk largely relied on Substack journalists to publish his Twitter Files, the move was met with widespread backlash across the social media site. Even from some of his fiercest defenders…
Of course, once it looked like blocking SubStack would be unpopular, Musk promptly reversed the decision — or rather, as per usual, insisted such blocking had never happened…
Late Night Open Thread: Elon Breaks Another ToyPost + Comments (47)