X, formerly Twitter, is allegedly limiting users access to The New York Times.
Since July, posts on Elon Musk's social media platform linking to the New York Times have seen a dramatic drop in engagement.
This abrupt drop in views is not reflected in links to similar news organizations such as the BBC, CNN, and the Washington Post, according to data collated by NewsWhip of 300,000 influential users of X.
According to Newswhip, this drop in engagement for Times posts is isolated to X as their data showed engagement with Times stories shared on Facebook remained consistent with other similar outlets.
NewsWhip's Benedict Nicholson told Semafor: “There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August.”
Times employees have already noticed the pattern, as high-profile figures' attempts to share articles failed to reach a wide audience on the platform.
Earlier this week, President Barack Obama shared multiple New York Times articles about healthcare costs, which reached fewer than 900,000 users on X. This was much lower than any other post shared by Obama since X began sharing engagement data earlier this year in comparison, a Politico story shared by the former president received almost 13 million views.
Higher-ups at the New York Times said leadership was aware of the issue and was examining the cause.
Is The Times Being Throttled on X?
It's unclear why Times engagement on Twitter has seemingly been throttled.
However, this is not a significant problem for the Times as most of the paper's traffic and readership come from other sources, and many still buy a physical copy of the newspaper every day.
However, this wouldn't be the first time the paper has been singled out since Musk took over Twitter. Times tech reporter Ryan Mac was briefly suspended from the social media platform last year. This summer, X briefly imposed a delay of several seconds on traffic on links to the Times, Reuters, and rival social media sites, including Facebook and Instagram.
The move came after Musk criticized the paper's coverage of events in the billionaire's native South Africa, explained to users how to avoid the Times paywall, and said the news organization was “once-powerful, but fundamentally doomed to be a regional and increasingly archaic legacy publication.”
At the time, a Times spokesperson said it had not received an explanation for the delay, but it “would be concerned by targeted pressure applied to any news organization for unclear reasons.”
Source: (Semifore).