Social media platform X, formerly known as Twitter, appeared to delay access to links to content from the websites of Reuters and The New York Times, as well as competitors such as Bluesky, Facebook and Instagram, as reported by The Washington Post on Tuesday. Concurrently, the company's TweetDeck application, now rebranded as X Pro as reported on Tuesday, started requiring payment to access its features.
Clicking a link on X to one of the affected websites resulted in a delay of about five seconds before the webpage loaded, The Washington Post reported, citing tests it conducted on Tuesday. Reuters also saw a similar delay in the tests it ran.
By late Tuesday afternoon, X appeared to have eliminated the delay. When contacted for comment, X confirmed the delay was removed but did not elaborate.
Billionaire Elon Musk, who bought social media giant Twitter in October, has previously lashed out at news organizations and journalists who have reported critically on his companies, which include Tesla and SpaceX.
Twitter has previously prevented users from posting links to competing social media platforms.
Reuters could not establish the precise time when X began delaying links to some websites.
A user on Hacker News, a tech forum, posted about the delay earlier on Tuesday and wrote that X began delaying links to The New York Times on Aug. 4. On that day, Musk criticized the publication's coverage of South Africa and accused it of supporting calls for genocide. Reuters has no evidence that the two events are related.
A spokesperson for The New York Times said it has not received an explanation from X about the link delay.
"While we don't know the rationale behind the application of this time delay, we would be concerned by targeted pressure applied to any news organization for unclear reasons," the spokesperson said Tuesday.
"We are aware of the report in The Washington Post of a delay in opening links to Reuters stories on X. We are looking into the matter," the Reuters spokesperson said.
Bluesky, an X rival that has Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey on its board, did not reply to a request for comment.
TweetDeck, a popular program that allows users to monitor several accounts at once, began going behind a paywall on Tuesday, with users of the X app being diverted to a paid-subscription sign-up page when they tried to access it.
X announced in July that TweetDeck, a dashboard allowing managing multiple accounts and showing multiple dashboards at the same time would be available only to "verified" account holders starting in August.
On Tuesday, users attempting to access the service, now rebranded as X Pro, were required to pay for X's blue checkmark verification for an annual fee of $84.
The social media firm, bought by Musk, has been thrashing around for ways to make a profit, cutting staff and ramping up its paid-for subscriptions.
Last week, CEO Linda Yaccarino said that the company was "close" to breaking even and would beef up staffing that had been slashed by Musk.
X's verified users are mostly those who have paid to receive the blue checkmark, though Musk has gifted the verification symbol to some.
Twitter bought London-based TweetDeck in 2011, with technology media putting the price tag at $40 million at the time.
