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.
This is such an incredible and incompetent failure for the amber alert system too though to be fair
Oh I bet the actual employees are painfully aware. But the lack of funding and government red tape? That’s the real failure.
I’m always totally surprised how willfully European governments have put so much power into the hands of Twitter. Nearly every organization and politician has a Twitter account to be used for official and semi-official communication. And Twitter isn’t and was never really very popular in Europe compared to Facebook and other social networks, which these same organizations and politicians demonized to the max. I hope this is a wake up call: there are no inherently good centralized and commercialized social networks fit for communicating important information to an audience of potentially everyone.
Yeah, I’m still baffled by the fact that all these officials are still on Twitter.
Yeah. Moronic to use Twitter for anything even remotely important like emergency alerts
I disagree.
Twitter was one of the largest social media platforms on the planet, and was especially huge in the US. Before Musk bought it it didn’t show any signs of failure. It lasted over a decade, and had enough reach that I think it made a lot of sense for things like emergency alerts, government officials, etc. to use it as one means, even a main means, of disseminating information. It was really effective at that until what, a year ago?
I don’t think anyone really predicted Elon Musk buying Twitter and running it into the ground within a year. Yes, it was hypothetically possible in our capitalist system, but there was no indication that it would until Elon made a joking tweet.
Because of how the modern internet has organized itself, it was inevitable that critical systems would utilize Twitter for it’s reach.
I think you’re applying hindsight and expecting people to have made decisions based on events that hadn’t happened yet. Before musk bought Twitter it wasn’t at all unreasonable for people to rely on it for information from government officials because it was the format millions of people were accustomed to receiving that information in every day.
Well then since this is hindsight then I hope everyone is learning now that we shouldn’t be relying on single corporate entities to deliver our emergency notifications.
“Retrospectively, it was a bad idea” makes more sense.
It’s like this. Ambulance use the road even if the the hospitals didn’t build it. Now imagine, twitter is the road.
We need to build new roads, and quickly. Actually, we’re on one right now.
Or at least some type of scruffy makeshift forest path.