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.
Between the garbage fire that is Twitter and the soulless corporate greed of Reddit, there couldn’t be a better time for people to explore federated alternatives. These social media giants think they’re going to generate more profit by these moves, but they’re setting themselves up to go the way of MySpace.
Obviously, you remember when MySpace was big. “No one is going to use Facebook…everyone is setup on MySpace.” We see how that went. So when people say “Aw nobody’s going to leave this platform…” I just smile.
Also, leaving a platform isn’t hard! Like, I get that the fediverse is a little wonky compared to current social media but at the end of the day, its create an account and go. People act like having to pick an instance is some great huge barrier to entry, but the main demographics all grew up using computers. It’s like saying not installing a shortcut on the desktop will prevent people from using your program in a generation that grew up with file paths.
I distinctly remember seeing memes being shared in 2019 that read, “Stop trying to make TikTok happen… it’s not going to happen”. That sure aged like milk.