X is Severely Punishing Posts With Links in Them—Here's The Proof

X makes it 1,900 percent more expensive to post links | The Verge

archived 21 Apr 2026 18:32:10 UTC

Elon Musk on Twitter / X

Interesting. Our algorithm tries to optimize time spent on X, so links don’t get as much attention, because there is less time spent if people click away. Best thing is to post content in long form on this platform.— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 3, 2023

Bluesky surpasses Threads and X as a referral traffic source

Bluesky drives three times more publisher traffic than Threads, some report: its open link-sharing policies offer an engaging alternative to restrictive platforms.

A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly

Elon Musk’s social media platform is boosting conservative content – and it’s having long-lasting effects on how users see the world.

A few weeks of X’s algorithm can make you more right-wing – and it doesn’t wear off quickly

Elon Musk’s social media platform is boosting conservative content – and it’s having long-lasting effects on how users see the world.

Despite Pledges From Musk, Child Sexual Abuse Material Persists on X

Reviews by the Canadian Center for Child Protection and The New York Times found that explicit images of children remain on the social media site owned by Elon Musk.

Elon Musk Has Pledged to Rid His Platform, X, of Child Sexual Abuse, but It Persists

Reviews by the Canadian Center for Child Protection and The New York Times found that explicit images of children remain on the social media site owned by Elon Musk.

X Corp

X, formerly known as Twitter, is a global social-media platform that facilitates real-time communication and the sharing of short messages, known as "tweets". Founded...

Twitter Is Dead, X Is Elon’s Personal Propaganda Platform, Where Grok Checks His Feed Before Answering

Last week, Elon Musk’s Grok AI started spewing extreme antisemitism, calling itself “MechaHitler” and pushing conspiracy theories about Jewish people. But that wasn’t the mo…

Xodus

...Building a movement away from toxic social media platforms, towards alternative open social media...

X Kills Nitter And Xcancel, The Last Ways To Read Tweets Without Elon Watching

When Twitter launched, it was originally designed to be just like an open protocol. In the early days, the company eagerly supported third party development, building on that protocol. But, because…

I drew a bunch of dots to explain why social media is broken.

Two years ago last month, I shut down This., a social media platform that allowed each member to share just 1 link a day. The service was…

Here’s What Elon Musk Sees When He Opens X (Published 2025)

The New York Times tracked 1,109 accounts that Mr. Musk follows on X to recreate his news feed.

They Criticized Musk on X. Then Their Reach Collapsed. (Published 2025)

Three users who disagreed with the site’s owner saw views for their posts plummet.

Sharing without clicking on news in social media

Social media have enabled laypersons to disseminate, at scale, links to news and public affairs information. Many individuals share such links without first reading the linked information. Here we analysed over 35 million public Facebook posts with uniform resource locators shared between 2017 and 2020, and discovered that such ‘shares without clicks’ (SwoCs) constitute around 75% of forwarded links. Extreme and user-aligned political content received more SwoCs, with partisans engaging in it more than politically neutral users. In addition, analyses with 2,969 false uniform resource locators revealed higher shares and, hence, SwoCs by conservatives (76.94%) than liberals (14.25%), probably because, in our dataset, the vast majority (76–82%) of them originated from conservative news domains. Findings suggest that the virality of political content on social media (including misinformation) is driven by superficial processing of headlines and blurbs rather than systematic processing of core content, which has design implications for promoting deliberate discourse in the online public sphere.