Elon Musk pushed back against journalist Matt Taibbi in response to his former “Twitter Files” ally’s Friday flounce from the platform — while Taibbi expressed bewilderment over the conflagration.
“All I can say is that I appear to be in the middle of a business dispute,” Taibbi told The Post Saturday.
One day after Taibbi complained about Twitter’s suppression of Substack, the subscription-based website that hosts his reporting, Musk insisted in a tweet that the charge “is false.”
“Substack links were never blocked” on Twitter, Musk claimed. Furthermore, he said, “Turns out Matt is/was an employee of Substack.”
“None of this is true,” Substack co-founder Chris Best retorted in a post on Substack’s Notes platform, a Twitter rival whose imminent launch appears to have sparked Musk’s ire. “It’s one thing to mess with Substack, but quite another to treat writers this way.”
On Friday Twitter began blocking “likes” and comments on tweets referring to Substack stories — two top ways for its writers to get attention — and slapped an “unsafe” label on Substack links.
“Anyone using the product can see this,” Best wrote.
By Saturday afternoon, the “unsafe” labels appeared to have been lifted from Substack links on Twitter, the platform Musk bought in October for $44 billion — and has been trying to monetize ever since.
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