💥 WTF is going on with Substack and Twitter?

Plus: Meta's AI tools, White House uses TikTok

Happy Easter Monday y’all.

One of the times of the year where we can enjoy a long long weekend (Friday, Monday off) 🙏

Today, let’s dive into the latest drama in the media world, Twitter et. Substack.

📙 Substack vs Twitter

Substack - A self-proclaimed new model for publishing

The story

Twitter & Elon made headlines (again) after seemingly going to war with Substack.

This follows Substack’s announcement of their Notes feed, which when you look quite closely, kinda reminds you of Twitter? (Ok, let’s be honest. It’s a Twitter clone)

Replies, shares, likes. Yep, all there.

Twitter responded by removing the ability to interact with any tweet mentioning Substack and its links, as well as searching for any Substack keyword within its platform 🙄

So much for free speech.

When Matt Taibbi noticed this (yes, it’s him from the Twitter Files), he notified his audience that he’d be switching to Substack Notes in the future.

Whether it’s true that Substack Notes is a Twitter clone (pretty likely), Substack tried to download Twitter data to boostrap this thing (maybe), or Elon is just being a massive dick (again), Twitter never fails to come up with new drama week after week 🤷‍♀️

So what’s Substack?

Substack’s an email newsletter publishing platform launched in 2017, touting their non-censorship approach to their platform.

It made waves back when COVID worries were at an all-time high, garnering whispers from media when it was reported that various COVID disinformation newsletters were raking in hella cash.

Substack was one of the first platforms to allow creators to monetize, build their audience, and grow with other newsletters, all in one place. Its mission of allowing journalists to find ‘financial freedom’ by writing, enticed whole groups of freelance writers to the platform at the height of the pandemic.

Others noticed their success, spawning competitors such as Beehiiv (what I’m using), Ghost, and ConvertKit.

What now?

We’d likely see Twitter revert the shadowban of Substack fairly soon. Substack CEO Chris Best is adamant that Elon is wrong in his claims, and is calling for Elon to treat writers on both platforms fairly.

Here’s a TikTok to wrap this story up 👇

@verge

Twitter shadowbans Substack, but some writers aren't too worried. #twitter #substack #techtok

📰 Press

👉 Meta to release generative AI tools for Ads by the end of 2023. This follows their release of SAM, a model that can accurately segment objects in an image or video with a single click 🤘

👉 White House to recruit TikTokers to help with campaign messaging (kinda ironic here??)

👉 An Instagram creator is outed for secretly using AI photos for his photography page

📸 Video of the day

An argument against having kids 😂🤣

@alaskaelevated

#viral #viralvideo #funny #funnyvideos #alaskaelevated #fails #kids #fail #parenthood #children #paint #ruined #couch #parenting

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