Elon Musk Accuses Matt Taibbi of Making ‘False’ Accusations About Twitter as Substack Feud Escalates
After a new product announcement this week, links to Substack from tweets have been subject to a variety of seemingly punitive actions and tweet embeds stopped working in Substack posts, leading to face of the Twitter Files Matt Taibbi announcing he is leaving Elon Musk’s app for good. But Musk says the claims made about the feud are “false” and implied Taibbi had a financial stake in making them.
In a Substack chat and subsequent post, Taibbi said that the steps taken by Twitter against Substack this week left him little choice but to leave the former for the latter permanently, even though doing so “will come with a price as far as any future Twitter Files reports are concerned.”
Taibbi said in his remarks that he learned Friday “Substack links were being blocked on Twitter.”
In a tweet on Saturday, Musk called that statement “false” and said the journalist is an “employee” of Substack — a remark that is curiously close to the accusation Taibbi is bought and paid for, which charge Democrats like Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz repeatedly leveled at the writer during his defense of the Twitter Files before congress.
It’s possible that Musk is resting that “false” on the fact that it remained technically possible to add a link to Substack in a tweet. However, tweets which contained links to Substack (where Taibbi publishes) were prevented from being retweeted or liked, the tweets containing them were throttled and did not appear in search, and clicking on such links should one ultimately come across them first takes the user to a warning page.
Musk also said in his tweet that Substack was “trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone” and that, for that reason, the links were being marked as unsafe. The implication is also that this would be the reason the embeds weren’t working at Substack, though he did not state that explicitly. The claim could not be independently verified, as Forbes and other outlets have reported
Substack co-founder and CEO Chris Best responded via Substack Notes, saying that Musk’s claims are false.
“Substack links have been obviously severely throttled on Twitter. Anyone using the product can see this,” said Best. “We believe we’re in compliance with the terms, but if they have any specific concerns we would love to know about them! We’d be happy to address any issues!”
Best also said that Taibbi “is not and has never been an employee of Substack.”
Substack allows writers to publish articles and a newsletter, to which readers can subscribe for various fees. Taibbi “gets paid directly by his readers,” wrote Best.
A community note has been attached to Musk’s tweet, as happens with many of his tweets, giving added context voted up by Twitter users..
At the time of this post, Taibbi has not responded to Musk saying his statements are false, nor has Musk responded to Substack’s Best.
