MANILA, Philippines – Social media platform X, formerly Twitter, has seemingly singled out New York Times (NYT), throttling engagement related to its stories, according to a new Semafor report.

The Semafor report released on Monday, September 11 (Philippine time), was based on data supplied by media monitoring platform NewsWhip, which pointed out a notable drop in engagement on X posts linking to NYT since July 2023.

Speaking to Semafor, NewsWhip spokesperson Benedict Nicholson said, “There was a drop off in engagement for NYT compared to the other sites in late July/early August.”

According to NewsWhip’s data on 300,000 influential users of X, the drop in engagement and other social media metrics related to NYT links is not reflected in links to similar news groups, such as CNN, the BBC, or the Washington Post.

NYT employees had already taken note of the pattern and the drop, with leadership at the news organization said to already be examining why engagement was dropping on X.

Additionally, the paper noted attempts by high-profile X users to share NYT content did not seem to get as much traction. Barack Obama, former US president, shared a number of stories from NYT regarding healthcare costs, but the shares reached fewer than 900,000 and 800,000 users, respectively.

Semafor added, “The number was far lower than any other post shared by the former president since X began sharing that data publicly earlier this year – for comparison, a Politico link shared by the president got nearly 13 million views.”

The Semafor report also said X did not comment when asked about the apparent throttling of engagement. – Rappler.com