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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.

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[-] Snapz@lemmy.world 128 points 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.

[-] Varixable@lemmy.fmhy.ml 4 points 1 year ago

Agreed. It's no coincidence that both Twitter and Reddit are shitting the bed at the same time.

Elon is pretty clearly an actual idiot, and has managed to get by thus far by just having a seemingly endless supply of fuck you money, but this is just capitalism doing the Predator bicep meme with foreign oligarchs to consolidate power.

[-] Dash11@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

I mean, it sort of is. Unless the fed is involved in this billionaire conspiracy also (which the nature of conspiracy theories will undoubtedly have someone saying of course the fed is in on it with the billionaires).

The simple answer really does make the most sense here. Interest rates are on the rise, and platforms like twitter and reddit have been around for a very long time and none of the venture capital backing them has ever turned a real profit despite the money being pumped into them. Investors will pull out money from the riskiest items first when interest rates rise, and the riskiest items are social media platforms that haven't demonstrated monetization potential even after a decade of use and monolithic control within their spaces. If a link aggregator like Reddit, which is really the only major player in its brand of social media can't turn a profit with basically no competition why would you continue supporting it?

[-] Varixable@lemmy.fmhy.ml 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Great point, and I do think you're right because that is the most sensible answer to what the motives behind these recent decisions are. There has been a nonstop flow of cheap debt for years that the fed is just now tightening up on.

But these business decisions also happen to align with the interests of deep pocketed bad actors. The why's of that are conspiracy theories.

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this post was submitted on 03 Jul 2023
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