What’s the real reason Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg want to do away with the hyperlink?
This excellent article discussing a podcast by former LA Times journalist Matt Pearce further reinforces the impression that social media and Big Tech are steadily taking over the internet through a variety of tricks we have seen employed for many years, among which is the growing practice of degrading hyperlinks so as to keep hold of users.
Since he took over Twitter, renaming it X, Elon Musk has degraded links on updates, claiming “they don’t get as much attention” as longer form pieces. Similarly, Facebook increasingly hides links or labels them as spam, while Instagram and TikTok make it hard to insert them.
Why do social networks want to remove links? Simple, but shabby: to keep users on their platforms, denying them access to other content. It may sound naïve, but I’m going to point out that this is contrary to the philosophy of the internet, which from the get go has been all about sharing links.
Indeed, Google’s success is based precisely on leveraging these links to calculate its famous algorithm: incoming links injected relevance into a page based on the relevance of the page from which they came.
Before Google, we accessed the internet via portals, which encouraged us to configure them as a login page in our…
