X Corp., formerly known as Twitter Inc., reportedly throttled links to websites and applications for which X owner Elon Musk has a particular distaste.

The issue has now been resolved, but for a while, when an X user clicked on a link to Meta Platforms Inc.-owned Threads, Facebook or Instagram, there was a five-second delay. The same thing reportedly happened when someone hit a link to the publishing website Substack or links to Reuters and The New York Times.

It’s not clear who gave the order for this, but according to an analysis by The Washington Post and other websites, the delay was real. The Post itself wasn’t part of the link throttling scheme, and neither were other news media sites such as USA Today and Fox News.

It’s believed that given Musk’s often mercurial behavior in the past where competitors are concerned, such as when he blocked links to Mastodon for a while and at one point prevented users from sharing Substack links, the latest link throttling was a petty swipe at sites that have upset him. He went as far as to block journalists’ accounts late last year after they were accused of publishing information regarding the tracking of his private jet. Musk has referred to the Times as the “Twitter equivalent of diarrhea.”

Links to sites such as Google LLC-owned YouTube and the social networking service Mastodon were not affected. As usual, it only took about one second to reach those sites from X. It’s believed someone at X used the t.co domain, a link-shortening service that the company uses to process links, to ensure the delay.

There’s evidence that even a very slight delay can upset an internet user. Not only will a long delay frustrate users and potentially compel them to click away, but a delay is said to affect how Google ranks the websites. In both cases, it can lead to a loss of revenue from less traffic and so less ad revenue.

One would think that this would be below Musk, a man with notable intelligence who currently heads some of the biggest companies in the world. That said, he has a history of seeming to take great satisfaction from mischievous behavior of this kind, even if he does call himself a “free speech absolutist.” It’s also noteworthy that Musk and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg are supposed to be having an MMA fight this year, though Zuckerberg has now said that’s unlikely.

Zuckerberg has responded to the delay his apps experienced on X but only with a “thinking face emoji” on Threads. Still, if this is all about petty antipathy, it’s rather silly for the world’s richest man to engage in this behavior. He hasn’t commented yet on the delays.

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