Twitter is Blocking Threads Links as App Crosses 100 Million Users

Threads, Meta’s new Twitter alternative is growing much faster than expected thanks to word of mouth and a seamless signup process via Instagram. According to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Threads has crossed 100 million registered users in just 5 days, and this apparently making Twitter quite nervous.

9to5Mac and other media outlets are reporting that Twitter has started blocking Thread links in searches. For many users (myself included), searching for “threads.net” on Twitter surfaces tweets with no actual URLs to Meta’s Twitter clone. Moreover, using the “url:” search operator to only surface tweets with Threads URLs shows no results at all.

While Twitter isn’t blocking users from sharing Threads URLs, the company apparently wants to make links to this competing platform invisible in search results. As of this writing, the workaround to search for Threads URLs on Twitter is to use the “url:” search operator with a space instead of a period between “threads” and “net”. That’s “url:threads net”, if you want to try it for yourself.

For Twitter, hiding Threads links in search results isn’t a great display of confidence in your own service, but that’s not a first for the company under Elon Musk’s leadership. Indeed, Twitter briefly blocked links to Mastodon back in December when the decentralized social network was starting to gain some steam.

After Musk previously invited Mark Zuckerberg to a cage match, Threads getting an unexpected amount of momentum has now led the Twitter CEO to send some eye-rolling personal attacks. “Zuck is a cuck”, Musk tweeted two days ago, and this message was followed by “I propose a literal dick measuring contest” yesterday. It’s really, really hard to imagine a CEO of a major tech company ever saying these things on the Internet, but here we are.