Threads reached 100 million users in a few days and became one of Twitter’s main rivals. Elon Musk’s social network is trying to fight back as it can, which apparently includes not showing in its search links to Meta’s platform.
The strange behavior was noticed by blogger Andy Baio and shared on Threads. He noticed that searches for “url:threads.net” return no results. The “url:” operator is for specifically looking for links with the term after the colon.
The search for “threads.net”, without “url:”, returns people who have put their address on the new social network as a display name on Twitter, which is impractical.
One way around this is to search for “url:”threads net”, without the period, with both terms in quotation marks. Searching for specific URLs, such as profiles or posts, also works.
Searching for this type of address, combined with the option to only see results from who you follow, would be a great way to find who is on the new network. With these limitations, it gets harder.
Interestingly, I tried to search for “url:corriereink.com” and the results didn’t show up either. The same happens in searches for “url:behance.net”, which leads to believe that the problem affects any link with the .net domain. It is not known if this is a bug or is intentional.
Twitter has already blocked Substack and Mastodon
You can’t tell whether or not the block is intentional. However, Twitter has already taken similar measures against competitors.
In April, the network limited the ways it engaged with posts that contained links to Substack. Users could not like, reply to, or retweet such posts. Searches for “substack” were also directed to “newsletter”.
In December 2022, Twitter also blocked links to Mastodon, a decentralized microblogging platform. Users could not publish network URLs.
The case, however, was more complex: it involved the account @ElonJet, which tracks the location of Elon Musk’s jet, owner of Twitter. The @ElonJet, by the way, is in Threads.