X, Elon Musk’s social media platform formerly known as Twitter, appears to be attempting to limit its users’ access to The New York Times.
Since late July, engagement on X posts linking to the New York Times has dropped dramatically. The drop in shares and other engagement on tweets with Times links is abrupt, and is not reflected in links to similar news organizations including CNN, the Washington Post, and the BBC, according to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X.
The drop in engagement in Times posts seems isolated to X: NewsWhip data showed that engagement with Times links shared on Facebook remained consistent relative to other outlets.
“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.
Times employees had already taken note of the pattern, as high-profile attempts to share Times articles failed to travel on the platform. For instance, earlier this week, former President Barack Obama shared multiple New York Times articles on X about healthcare costs, which the service said reached fewer than 900,000 and 800,000 users respectively. The number was far lower than any other post shared by the former president since X began sharing that data publicly earlier this year — for comparison, a Politico link shared by the president got nearly 13 million views.
Source: https://www.semafor.com/article/09/10/2023/twitter-appears-to-throttle-new-york-times