It looks like Twitter shadowbanned Rockstar over the GTA 6 trailer

Well, that’s a choice

Twitter has, apparently, shadow-banned Rockstar for not debuting the GTA 6 trailer on Twitter – er, X, or whatever you want to call it. Twitter user and Rockstar enthusiast Ben, who goes by VideoTechUK on Twitter, first noticed the situation, after Twitter CEO Linda Yaccarino complained about Rockstar hosting the trailer on YouTube.

After Yaccarino’s post, the Rockstar post with the trailer’s YouTube link started showing up as “unavailable” for several users, including Ben and myself, which means you’re a lot less likely to see it appear in your feeds. You have to navigate directly to Rockstar’s page to find the post. That likely explains why the trailer tweet has 8 million views, compared to the 72 million views for the Dec. 4 post that embeds directly on Twitter.

“While in the first hours, the tweet had higher views, the YouTube video now has surpassed the tweet,” tech writer and cyberlaw professor Alejandra Caraballo said on Twitter in response to the situation. “Unlike Twitter which counts an impression as a view, we know YouTube counts a view if the user watched at least 30 seconds of the video. Tried replicating on other massive posts to see if it's a platform issue. Other posts with 40M+ views have no issue loading.”

Pictured: YouTube driving away with Twitter's ad dollars / Rockstar

“It infuriates me. Imagine trying to sabotage a huge post after a big situation occurs,
Ben said in a reply to their original tweet. “Their new post from today only had 6M views so they're intentionally limiting their tweets.”

The situation comes a few weeks after major brands, including Apple, backed away from Twitter, citing concerns over their advertisements appearing alongside hateful content that Twitter promotes or lets exist without repercussion.

Whether this is some kind of bug, Elon Musk not liking the idea of being mean to cops, or a bizarre form of revenge against a company using other social media platforms is unclear, but if it is retaliation, it’s not working very well. The trailer on YouTube accumulated over 72 million views in just slightly over 12 hours.