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.
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.