LONDON: X, formerly Twitter, appears to be limiting access to The New York Times website, news website Semafor reported on Monday.
Citing an investigation by social media traffic engagement platform NewsWhip, the engagement rate of posts published by The NYT has dropped significantly on X since late July.
“There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August,” NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson told Semafor.
NewsWhip’s data was drawn from 300,000 influential users of X, the Elon Musk-owned platform.
The investigation found that this trend seems isolated to X, and it could not find any changes with NYT links shared on other platforms, such as Facebook.
It also said that no other outlets were affected by this anomaly.
The NYT is said to be aware of the issue and is investigating.
It revealed that several articles about healthcare costs shared by former US President Barack Obama last week gained significantly fewer views compared to other articles shared by Obama.
While it remains unclear why engagement on X has been reduced for The NYT, it appears that the publication is being singled out on the platform.
Semafor’s Maxwell Tani said that although the decrease in engagement does not represent a significant audience issue for The NYT, the recent history of Musk taunting the publication on Twitter and the fact that its engagement remains unaffected on other platforms “make it harder to believe in alternative explanations.”
