Twitter Warns Its Users to Stop Sharing Instagram Links

Social network Twitter is gunning for rival Facebook, prompting high-profile users of its website to ditch Instagram in favor of Twitter’s onboard photo service.

A report on Mashable said that Twitter began asking its high-profile users to “post your photos directly on Twitter to make sure your fans always see them.”

This refers to the fact that Instagram photos, unlike those posted directly to Twitter, don’t show up in Timeline view.

Instead, photos simply show as an Instagram.com link and push the user to the website for viewing.

This is because Instagram disabled support for displaying images in tweets two years ago, about the same time that Twitter introduced native photo-editing and filters.

Since then, Instagram continued to increase in popularity, thanks in part to its acquisition by Facebook, and recently overtook Twitter in monthly active users.

Instagram’s monthly user base now numbers more than 300 million, while Twitter sits at 284 million.

This prompted Twitter co-founder Evan Williams to hit back, claiming that user numbers were not the most important metric.

“If you think about the impact Twitter has on the world versus Instagram, it’s pretty significant,” he told Fortune.

“Twitter is what we wanted it to be. It’s this real-time information network where everything in the world, important stuff, breaks on Twitter and world leaders have conversations on Twitter.

“If that’s happening, I frankly don’t give a s*** if Instagram has more people looking at pretty pictures.”

This article was originally published on the Inquirer.