Posts containing links to external sites which are not owned by the parent company are downranked or outright excluded in many social media feeds. This has been a known pattern for many years.

It's not only Facebook doing it, but they are probably the biggest offender.

For a long time. Essentially all social media will heavily downrank any post that includes a link. They don't want you leaving.

Every platform hates links. Xitter started trying to make links look like pictures, for example.

https://dev.to/ascorbic/bring-back-the-twitter-link-preview-...

X deprioritizes content that includes links outside of X.

In Instagram you can't really even put links at all. It's on purpose to keep you scrolling inside the walled garden.

Try clinking hyperlinks on any modern platform that A) don't try to open in-platform, and/or B) don't try to generate an AI summary of its content as the default rather than open it (looking at you Hubspot), and/or C) don't hit you with a modal that requires you to check a box in addition to clicking through.

It's always like this. Just keep adding layers of friction until people don't bother. Engagement is still the obsession.

It's a shame that Musk's politics are a distraction from the ways that Twitter has become hostile and worse for non-political reasons. That was the first place I became aware of hyperlinks causing posts to get hidden or downranked.