As Twitter continues to take a more aggressive stance against competitors, one gaming journalist found out the hard way as he tried to promote his newsletter.
Jason Schreier is a gaming journalist, well-known by those in the industry. Author of the books Press Reset: Ruin and Recovery in the Video Game Industry and Blood, Sweat, and Pixels: The Triumphant, Turbulent Stories Behind How Video Games Are Made, Schreier is primarily known for his investigative journalism for the publisher Kotaku and later the Bloomberg technology team.
Recently, Schreier, who reaches an audience of over 350,000 fans on Twitter shared his Substack. This application lets creatives set up a blog and email newsletter and enables fans to support their favorite creators by subscribing. Essentially, journalists can monetize their work to their audience without the need for Twitter. This, however, didn’t work as planned, as all interactions for the post were disabled.
In the tweet, Schreier states:
“I’ll be posting much more on my Substack once the new Notes feature launches. Sadly, Twitter won’t let you interact with this tweet. Guess the owner of this website sees it as a genuine threat”
Limiting Freedom of Speech on Twitter Has Detrimental Effects
While for some, the perception of Twitter is merely people arguing with one another, for journalists and the media industry, Twitter is a useful tool. Before the app, writers and journalists often had to rely on press releases, newswires, and in-person reporting to get up-to-date news on happenings and events.
Because Twitter enables people, notable figures, and companies to communicate directly to the public, it makes getting breaking information much easier and faster, regardless of where you are. Limits to the types of Tweets that can be interacted with hurt the post’s reach, resulting in fewer people seeing the content.
For creatives and journalists looking to foster their own dedicated communities, this can make promoting their work on other platforms much more difficult. Only time will tell whether Twitter will continue to prevent certain types of messages from being interacted with, but we’ll keep up with this story in our News Section.
