Twitter customers looking for hyperlinks to Meta’s microblogging rival Threads are discovering that the Elon Musk-owned social media community seems to be limiting outcomes. That’s regardless of Twitter at present being stuffed with hyperlinks to Threads content material, which you’d anticipate to have the ability to discover by way of search. We noticed the habits by way of a Threads post from Andy Baio, however the habits can also be being broadly reported by Twitter customers.
The problem was first seen when utilizing the “url:” search operator, which is often used to search for links to a specific URL. For instance, looking “url:theverge.com” on Twitter brings up each single tweet that hyperlinks to any web page on The Verge, no matter whether or not the URL has been shortened. However looking for “url:threads.net” returns zero outcomes, regardless of there being loads of tweets that hyperlink to the area.
Likewise, looking for “threads.web” with out the “url:” operator turns up dozens of irrelevant outcomes from customers with their Threads account of their show identify, or who’re speaking concerning the service with out linking to it — it doesn’t floor any linked Threads posts.
It’s nonetheless doable to search out hyperlinks to Threads posts on Twitter, however you’ll should get artistic. Looking for “url:“threads web”” with an area between “threads” and “web” is one of the best workaround we’ve seen, and it’s also possible to nonetheless seek for particular Thread submit URLs (like this). However the obvious restriction provides friction to the method, making it more durable to simply discover a broad array of Threads hyperlinks on Twitter.
It’s unclear how intentional this habits is, and an enquiry despatched to Twitter’s press line returned the customary poop emoji auto-reply. However Twitter proprietor Elon Musk has been intensely vital of Threads and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg. “Competitors is ok, dishonest will not be,” Musk tweeted on July 6th. “Zuck is a cuck,” was his less measured response three days later. Twitter has additionally threatened to sue Meta over Threads, claiming Meta has engaged in “systematic, willful, and illegal misappropriation of Twitter’s commerce secrets and techniques and different mental property.”
Elon Musk attempted to justify the constraints positioned on Substack hyperlinks by saying the service “was attempting to obtain a large portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone.” However his considerations seemed to be short-lived: a day later Substack said “the suppression of Substack publications on Twitter” seemed to be over.
