Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter's links from its search results after the social network's owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users...

Google has reportedly removed much of Twitter’s links from its search results after the social network’s owner Elon Musk announced reading tweets would be limited.

Search Engine Roundtable found that Google had removed 52% of Twitter links since the crackdown began last week. Twitter now blocks users who are not logged in and sets limits on reading tweets.

According to Barry Schwartz, Google reported 471 million Twitter URLs as of Friday. But by Monday morning, that number had plummeted to 227 million.

“For normal indexing of these Twitter URLs, it seems like these tweets are dropping out of the sky,” Schwartz wrote.

Platformer reported last month that Twitter refused to pay its bill for Google Cloud services.

  • Snapz@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    Twitter was an important unifying communications tool during the Arab Spring. The Arab spring was a threat to biz as usual in places like Saudi Arabia. The second largest investor in Twitter is Saudi Arabia.

    Saudi Arabia killed and dismembered a journalist from the US, more or less in plain sight. Elon is now killing and dismembering Twitter in plain sight to limit its power as a unifying tool that stands as a demonstrable, active threat to capitalism and oligarchs around the world.

    Billionaires do favors for other billionaires. It’s part of why spez is trying to tank Reddit. Remember how dangerous Reddit was to capitalism’s status quo around the time of GME/Robinhood/Antiwork recently.

    The specific moment we’re in right now is meant to shatter consolidated organizing power on Reddit as we splinter into several smaller alternative platforms (or for some, disconnect entirely). Not saying we shouldn’t be in Lemmy, but calling out the larger reality of the moment.

    Billionaires do favors for other billionaires.

    • WimpyWoodchuck@feddit.deEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      This sounds a lot like Hanlon’s razor. “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.”

      Do you really believe that people like spez, Zuckerberg, Musk behave like they do because they want to do favors for other billionaires? Isn’t it much more likely that they’re just … disturbed? That they are narcissistic, megalomaniac, maybe idealistic in their own believe. And in being that, they make stupid decisions because they literally work differently than regular folks.

      • jochem@lemmy.mlEnglish
        0·
        1 year ago

        Yeah, I also seriously doubt there’s a big conspiracy happening where ultra rich people are helping each other. Have you looked at those people? Most don’t give a fuck about anyone but themselves.

        Musk bought Twitter around the time he was fighting with this guy that had the private jet tracker. I think it’s more reasonable to believe that Musk bought Twitter just to shut that down and now it’s a toy he can play with, where every time he merely touches it, media jumps on it, which feeds his ego massively. And once Twitter is dead, he’ll discard it and move on to the next thing. Like a cat playing with its prey.

        • frumpyfries@lemmy.worldEnglish
          1·
          1 year ago

          Normally I would tend to agree with you, but look where Musk got his “loans” to buy out Twitter. Saudi Arabia and Russia where big “lenders”.