X owner Elon Musk appeared to confirm what may users have suspected for long: Putting a link in a post on his social network will limit the reach of the post. X, the company, hasn’t publicly acknowledged the bias but Musk’s recent post on the platform strongly suggests it.

“The deprioritisation of tweets with links in them is Twitter’s biggest flaw,” wrote Silicon Valley investor Paul Graham, who has nearly 1.9 million followers. Musk replied: “Just write a description in the main post and put the link in the reply. This just stops lazy linking.”

It’s a sign of the times, as Harry Styles would say. The weblink has fallen on hard times and platforms want to be walled gardens, looking for exclusive content.

At the turn of the century, Google, followed by social networks, gave legacy media a chance to thrive with links taking readers to different websites. The early months of Donald Trump’s first stab at the White House turned out to be a shrinking moment for newsrooms but the weblink ruled as newsrooms remoulded their editorial strategies to maximise clicks.

The problem — if you look at it from the perspective of a social media platform — with the weblink is it diverts traffic from a website.

Be it YouTube, Instagram or X, all platforms are making it harder to find a link to outside sources, leaving publishers with fewer options for workarounds, like posting an image or video that implores users to find a link to the content elsewhere, such as on their bio page. To make things worse, Google has started to answer user questions directly with AI before showcasing a list of links.

Before purchasing Twitter, Musk spoke about “citizen journalists” who post directly on X rather than linking to their work elsewhere. He has also made his disdain for traditional media clear. “You are the media now,” he told X users on November 6, the day Donald Trump became president-elect.

Links are beneficial if users want to point to original sources or highlight in-depth reporting. Adding a link to a post also can also highlight credibility on social media.

But tech giants don’t see it that way and think links take eyes away from a platform. We also cannot ignore the reality when links lead to malware, scams or misinformation.

These are the days of social media influencers. A recent survey by Pew Research found that one in five Americans — and 37 per cent of adults under 30 — say they regularly get news from influencers on social media. Further, around 85 per cent of those influencers maintain a presence on X, while a little less than half have accounts on Instagram and YouTube.

Since Meta’s Threads launched in July 2023, it has become a good alternative to X. Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram and Threads, said in a Threads post last week that the platform doesn’t explicitly suppress link posts — but, according to Washington Post, “its algorithm may do so implicitly, by prioritising posts that get likes and comments over those that generate clicks”.

On the other hand, Bluesky loves links and the open web. But most news organisations and readers are not on Bluesky.