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.
Blocking users who are not logged in has farther reaching consequences that aren’t readily apparent. For example, there was an AMBER Alert a few days ago with a short link to see more info. The link goes back to a Twitter account/tweet. All that time sensitive, useful information was behind a wall where you can’t see it unless you log in. Most people aren’t going to create an account just to do that.
This is exactly why we should be encouraging local libraries, universities, law enforcement, city, and county governments how to set up Mastodon servers.
On the one hand, when you have a duty to inform the public, it no longer makes sense to suffer at the whims of tech billionaires. There was a time, for a decade or two, when these sites prioritized access and predictability, but no more. When you have information that you need to have accessible, the only guarantee is to control it yourself. They can still use corporate social media to get the message out to their network, but link it back to their mastodon account. Roll it into their IT departments just like their email server.
On the other hand, it’s a critical step for the success of the fediverse. Universal email adoption came about because it was used by government and universities. What you could call the original social network is still an open protocol, it’s not owned by any single corporation or government, and still the primary form of communication online. About 2 billion emails have been sent since you started reading this.