X briefly blocked users from viewing a link to an NPR story about Donald Trump’s recent visit to Arlington National Cemetery, raising questions about the Elon Musk-owned platform giving the former president a thumbs up.
On Thursday, NPR posted a link to a story featuring reporter Stephen Fowler quoted An employee at Arlington National Cemetery was “roughly pushed aside” earlier this week during an event attended by Trump and members of his campaign, an Army official said. There was a way out previously reported A “physical altercation” broke out at the event with campaign workers due to federal laws that prohibit campaigning in a cemetery.
Some users on X who attempted to click the link to the story were greeted with a warning message that X thought “this link may be dangerous.” It said it could be malicious, violent, spammy or violate the platform’s rules, but did not explain why the link was flagged. Fowler posted a thread on X, with each tweet containing a link to his story – warning, for unknown reasons, the first two instances of the link were affected, but not the others. It is quite unusual for such a warning to appear before a link to the main website. Other links to NPR, as well as other coverage of Trump’s visit to Arlington, have no such tag.
In statement to an NPR reporter, an X spokesperson claimed that the alert appeared due to a “false positive” and that it has been fixed. The company did not provide further information.
It should be noted that Musk was a vocal supporter of Trump in these elections and recently had a long live chat with him on X. Musk has also publicly clashed with NPR in the past. which adds a Labeled “state media” for several months of last year. NPR hasn’t posted from its main account on X since the tag was added last April.
Update August 29, 2024, 2:35 PM ET: This story has been updated to add more details from an X spokesperson and to indicate that the link is no longer labeled as “secure”.
