# Nieman Journalism Lab: Twitter/X Punishes Accounts That Post Links > Source: > Published: 2026-06-05 20:46:56+00:00 Laura Hazard Owen, writing for Nieman Journalism Lab back in April: I used Claude to help me scrape the 200 most recent tweets from 18 large publishers’ X accounts and track the engagement (likes + comments + retweets) on each. Six of those publishers have paywalls: [Bloomberg],[CNN],[Forbes],[The New York Times],[The Wall Street Journal], and[The Washington Post]. Nine don’t:[Al Jazeera English],[AP],[BBC],[Breitbart News],[CBS News],[Daily Wire],[Fox News],[NBC News], and[Reuters]. The last three accounts I looked at —[Leading Report],[unusual_whales,]and[Globe Eye News]— are not news publishers, but aggregate breaking news in tweets without links. (Here, for example, is an example of a Leading Report[tweet]: “BREAKING: Iran has halted direct talks with the US, per WSJ.” They’re sometimes referred to as engagement-maxing accounts.These charts make it pretty clear that links in tweets hurt engagement. The connection was so apparent in my analysis that a graph including all 18 publishers is almost unreadable: The traditional, link-loving publishers are clustered in the bottom left corner (lots of links, little engagement) in a nearly indistinguishable mass of bubbles, no matter how large their followings are. Musk’s Twitter/X is not an aggregator for news. It’s a walled garden. But the type of garden where you need to keep your eyes open and your hand on your wallet. Sometimes it’s fun to visit a seedy neighborhood. But let’s not pretend it isn’t a seedy neighborhood just because, long ago, it used to be nice.