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 browser, and which offered all kinds of services, such as news, e-mail, weather forecasts, horoscopes; whatever, as long as the user remained on the portal and generated page views, which of course, were conveniently stuffed with advertising.

As a result, links on portals tended to be internal ones to pages controlled by the portal itself. Newspapers also played this game (some, in fact, continue to do so), all too fearful that if they offer their readers ways out, they will leave and never come back.

When blogs arrived on the scene, they did the opposite, and were filled with permalinks that invited readers to go and read the sources cited in the article, confident that they would return because, based on finding interesting content, they would come to consider the page as a useful reference. Blogs conquered Google’s original algorithm because they had a generally clean structure and because they generated a lot of links, something that Google considered very positive for the construction of its index, and the internet in general.

Now, social networks are increasingly applying “portal syndrome” in the belief that by getting rid of links their hapless users will turn into zombies who mindlessly doomscroll, making them the ideal prey for advertisers.

It may seem obvious, but until I read what Pierce had to say, I hadn’t thought about it that way. And it makes me really angry. The initial purpose of social networks, to facilitate relationships between people, has been reduced to that of being receptacles for hyper-segmented advertising laser-beamed at an increasingly captive audience. And in the process, the internet, and everything it once stood for, is being devalued. And we know who the people responsible for this are.

(En español, aquí)

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This post was previously published on MEDIUM.COM.

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