Musk admits X throttles links as ‘news influencers’ take over

X owner Elon Musk seemed to confirm what sharp-eyed users have suspected for months: that putting a link in your post on his social network is a good way to ensure it won’t go viral. Musk was replying to a post by the influential Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who opined that “the deprioritization of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw.” X’s main draw, Graham said, is “to find out what’s going on, and you can’t do that without links.” Musk’s response implied Graham was right that X’s algorithm downgrades link posts. “Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply,” Musk said, mentioning a strategy that some savvy X users were already employing. “This just stops lazy linking.”