Twitter is turning Tweetdeck into paid service after slowing down access to rival sites

Twitter has tried to make its premium subscription more enticing to users

Twitter, rebranded as X, is now officially turning Tweetdeck into a paid service and placing it behind a paywall, after slowing down access to rival social media platforms including Meta’s Threads and Facebook.

Tweetdeck, which was also rebranded recently to “X Pro”, now requires a Blue subscription to access it.

The latest change follows Twitter’s announcement in July that users must be “verified” to access TweetDeck.

Non-subscribing users visiting Tweetdeck’s website are now being redirected to a page promoting signup to Twitter’s premium service.

Tweetdeck, which allows users to access different accounts and multiple custom feeds, was one of the most popular Twitter third-party apps, and was acquired by the social media company in 2011.

Twitter has tried to make its premium subscription more enticing to users with added features like ad revenue sharing, formatting, and higher rankings in conversations.

Now it appears the social media company, rebranded as X, is hoping the addition of XPro to this list of added features would attract more premium subscribers.

On Tuesday, X also appeared to slow down the loading times of some of the platform’s competitors such as Meta’s Facebook, Instagram, and Threads as well as Substack and news media sites posted to X.

Links posted to X from some websites were taking about five seconds longer than usual to load on Tuesday, but the platform began reversing some of the changes restricting quick view of news sites.

Meta chief Mark Zuckerberg reacted to a post on the issue with a “thinking face emoji”.

“Substack was created in direct response to this kind of behaviour by social media companies,” the company’s founders, Chris Best, Hamish McKenzie and Jairaj Sethi, said in a statement.

This is not the first time X, formerly Twitter, has taken decisions to restrict access to rival websites.

In December, X-owner Elon Musk announced he would ban “free promotion” of other social media services, and also suspend accounts encouraging users to move to other platforms.

This announcement came as the platform’s rival Mastodon was growing in popularity, partly due to users’ discontent with changes made by the Tesla titan to Twitter since his takeover of the company.

“We will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter,” Mr Musk said before the company decided to reverse its decision.