Popular news platform Substack has launched a Twitter counterpart to its Notes app. Elon Musk, continuing to discredit Twitter with a very peculiar fight for “freedom” of speech, responded by blocking the ability to search, like or retweet any message containing the word “Substack” – users see a special warning window.

Many Substack users, the vast majority of whom are small business owners who depend on Substack as an enterprise software provider, have responded by deciding to leave Twitter and use Substack Notes (another “win” for Musk in the battle for audience).

Elon Musk explained his decision by saying that Substack was allegedly “trying to download a huge part of the Twitter database in order to create its own Twitter clone” – which seems unlikely, especially without evidence.

Substack CEO Chris Best responded to Elon in a post on Substack Notes. The feature is in beta testing, so there’s no permanent link yet, but he relayed the message to The Verge – the publication published a screenshot:

Course

Spring Cloud Microservices for Java

Best claims that Substack has been using the Twitter API for years and adheres to the terms of service. He tried to understand that Twitter had never notified the company of any wrongdoing on its part. He also expressed disappointment in the fact that the measures taken by Musk, in fact, have little effect on the popularity of Notes (users are already Substack customers), but only create problems for subscribers.

The Streisand effect and cosmic freedom of speech: Twitter suspended the account of the alternative social network Mastodon and does not allow sharing links to it