After Substack announced a new feature called Substack Notes, which essentially brings a social media-like feed with tweet-like posts to the newsletter platform, Twitter appears to be going to war with Substack by blocking likes, retweets, and comments on tweets that include a link to a Substack newsletter.
It appears that Twitter may currently be feuding with the newsletter platform Substack.
Substack writers began noticing that they were no longer able to embed tweets when creating a post on Substack yesterday. While this could’ve been just a technical issue, perhaps related to Twitter switching over to its new yet heavily-criticized API plans, it appears now that something more is going on here.
Twitter is now blocking likes, retweets, and comments on tweets that include a link to a Substack newsletter. In addition, Twitter users cannot pin a tweet that includes a Substack link to their profile.
The timing of these issues, which seem to solely be affecting Substack links, is peculiar. Just one day before these Twitter errors started appearing, Substack announced a new feature called Substack Notes. It basically brings a social media-like feed with tweet-like posts to the newsletter platform. It’s not exactly a Twitter competitor, as it exists within the newsletter platform’s ecosystem, but it sure does look like one.
Yesterday, when Mashable reached out to Substack regarding the embed tweet issue, a spokesperson provided us with the following statement.
According to guidance issued to staffers via an email obtained by Axios, the White House refused to pay $8 for Twitter Blue verification.
You can read more about this topic here.