Twitter is Reportedly Blocking Links to Meta Rival Threads

By Abdullah Shahid ⏐ 3 years ago ⏐

2 min read

Earlier this year, Twitter was found blocking links to another competitor named ‘Substack’, making it impossible for any user to like, retweet or reply to any tweet with a Substack link

Twitter new rival ‘Threads’, which has gained over a 100 million users in just 5 days of its launch has definitely proved to be a threat for Twitter, forcing the platform to take some extreme steps, one of which even included the threat of a legal filing against Meta, which is the parent company behind Threads.

Taking its resistance against the new application a step further, Twitter has now been blocking all Threads links on its platform; What this means is that any Tweet that includes a Threads link is not appearing on the Twitter search and each time a user searches the term ‘url:threads.net’, they get no results.

First reported by a Twitter user named Andy Baio, the problem was then reported by a lot of other users as well, all of whom said that they are unable to find any Tweets that include a link to Meta platform Threads.

Twitter vs Threads

If you search Twitter posts with a link to Threads, you won't find them!

Before that Notes by @SubstackInc had a similar problem, when Twitter removed the ability to RT and Like posts with links to them for a few days.

But if you need : URL:“threads net” 🤫 pic.twitter.com/fCM1aneqs6

— iceoff 🌭🦾🦇🔊 (@iceoff_eth) July 11, 2023

Well, this was not the first time, Musk owned Twitter used link blocking against its competitors. Towards the start of the year, the platform was found blocking links to another competitor named ‘Substack’, making it impossible for any user to like, retweet or reply to any tweet with a Substack link.

Musk, who at the time was serving as the Twitter CEO, defended the Substack link restrictions saying that Substack was downloading a massive portion of Twitter’s database inorder to bootstrap their own version of a Twitter rival.

While users are unable to search for Threads links using the search term ‘url:threads.net’, they have found a work around the restrictions, reporting that they can still search Threads url’s by simply using the search term ‘url:Threads net’.