Elon Musk’s X social network seems to slow down access to websites that the billionaire openly dislikes.
According to Business Insider’s assessment, it takes 5 seconds to access the article links of the sites on this list on X including: The New York Times, Reuters, Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky and Substack. These are all websites that have been publicly attacked by Musk in the past.
Twitter’s former head of trust and safety said on Bluesky that it would be unusual for Chrome to take 5 seconds to receive 650 bytes of data, suggesting interference here. Even a one-second delay can lead to user distraction, he said, increasing the bounce rate of the platform and impacting the site.
Some users also reported that the links to Thread, an X-like application released by Meta, on X were also slow to access. Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Meta, responded to a “thinking face emoji” with a Threads post about the issue.
The fact that X slows down links to websites that Elon Musk publicly contradicts was discovered by one user and the incident began on August 4.
The fact that Musk allows personal conflicts to affect social networks has happened before. This billionaire used to block links to Substack, Threads and other competitors. Earlier this year, Musk also revoked the New York Times verification stamp.
X has not yet commented on the incident.