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.
I’m glad I’m not the only person thinking about this. I had no idea about the Saudis owning Twitter like that. All decisions made by the rich are for MoneyTM. Usually it’s MoneyTM in either the form of growth (profit, short term) or investment (power, stability, long term). Some of spezs actions are easily explained by MoneyTM when you take into account LLMs mining reddit. But that does not explain being so insanely hardline with their API. There was absolutely a resolution to that that was profitable and didn’t continue giving away “their” information for free. This is where I think a 3rd MoneyTM comes into play: existential investments. These are actions they take to ensure the other two forms of MoneyTM continue to function the way they want them to. Such as tanking the two most significant online tools for organizing collective action against them.
Decisions at that level are made for power. Sometimes money is part of that
I mean, yes, but I think “sometimes” really underestimates role money plays in a capitalist world. Money is power. People who tell you otherwise are trying to sell you something.