Twitter is now slowing down traffic on links to the crowdfunding site Patreon, WhatsApp, and at times, Meta’s Messenger app, a Markup analysis confirms.
Using a tool launched by The Markup last month, readers discovered that links to these sites were delayed by an average of 2.5 seconds—findings we confirmed.
Patreon users told The Markup that the throttling undermines their ability to reach new supporters on Twitter, which has historically been a key platform for building donations. “It’s dirty pool,” said Matt Carlin, the producer of a popular call-in show, Office Hours Live, which takes in nearly $30,000 per month from Patreon and is being throttled. “It’s another big tech company trying to squash little guys—or, in their attempts to squash bigger guys, squashing little guys like us.”
In September, The Markup reported that Twitter, now officially named X, was slowing down links to Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, and Substack, also by an average of 2.5 seconds, which can feel extremely slow for users. We simultaneously launched a tool that lets readers test any link posted on X (which the platform automatically shortens using the t.co domain), and measured the time it took for X to redirect the link to its original destination. The Markup also built a bot that would let us know if any links readers were testing appeared to be throttled.
Shortly after publication, readers began using our tool, and we received alerts that Patreon, WhatsApp, and Messenger links appeared to be throttled. To confirm these findings, we created new links and measured over several days the performance of redirects to the 25 top-earning Patreon campaigns, as measured by tracking site Graphtreon on September 30.
During that time, we also tested 25 randomly selected recently tweeted links to both WhatsApp and Messenger. With the exception of six Messenger links that do not seem to be throttled, we consistently found the same 2.5-second slowdown. We do not know why most, but not all, links to Messenger’s m.me domain are throttled.