Sep 19, 2023 16:45:00

A test has appeared that confirms that X (Twitter) is still intentionally slowing down access to Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack.

It was

pointed out in August 2023 that X (Twitter) intentionally slows down access to some sites. Since then, access speeds to Reuters, The New York Times, etc. have improved, but access to Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack remains slow. Tech news site The Markup has created and published a test that can confirm this fact.

Twitter is Still Throttling Competitors' Links—Check for Yourself – The Markup
https://themarkup.org/investigations/2023/09/15/twitter-is-still-throttling-competitors-links-check-for-yourself

The Markup has set up a test called ``Test if Twitter/X is throttling a website right now'' near the center of

the article so that you can experience what kind of speed limit is actually being implemented. You can press the button for each site written as 'Test a website' or paste the shortened link to the site obtained from X in the input area at the bottom.

For example, The Markup took 88ms to redirect from the shortened URL to the original URL, and loaded in 90ms.

When I tried it with Bluesky, the initial redirection first took 2544ms, then the redirection from http to https took 74ms, and the load completed in 86ms. It's obviously loading slowly.

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According to The Markup, un-speed-limited sites took an average of 39 milliseconds to access, while speed-limited sites like Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack took an average of 2,544 milliseconds to access. There was a delay of seconds (approximately 2.5 seconds).

Research conducted by Google in the past has shown that 53% of users will give up on viewing a website if it takes more than 3 seconds to display, and the speed limit by X acts as a form of harassment against rivals. It is considered.

In addition, when The Markup measured access to Facebook, Instagram, Bluesky, and Substack in the same way using Bitly (bit.ly), a link shortening service, it was clearly faster than X's link shortening service T.co. Loading is in progress. In the graph below, red shows the loading speed of t.co and brown shows the loading speed of Bitly. The lower the plot position is, the faster it will load. The horizontal axis is time, and although we checked for 4 days, the redirect speed of t.co did not improve.