X Debunks Popular Engagement Myth on Pope Leo’s Tweet
X Head of Product Nikita Bier debunked a persistent social media fable on May 31, instantly telling the Vatican’s account that embedding a hyperlink in an X submit doesn’t cut back its attain.
The change adopted @Pontifex, the Vatican’s official account, which posted an excerpt from Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, with a hyperlink to the complete textual content on vatican.va. A person replied, advising the Pope to append the URL in a threaded reply for higher algorithmic efficiency.
X Head of Product Steps In
Bier entered the thread with a single-line response addressed to the pinnacle of the Catholic Church:
“Hey Pope, this isn’t true. Links won’t deboost your submit.”
As Head of Product, Bier thus oversees X’s rating and suggestion structure. His correction, due to this fact, carries as a lot official weight as any public assertion on the topic can carry.
The perception that linking to off-platform locations suppresses a submit’s attain has circulated extensively for years. This has pushed many social media groups towards workarounds like reply-threading hyperlinks.
Bier joined X in mid-2025 after constructing TBH and Gas, two viral social apps acquired by Facebook and Discord. His first 12 months on the platform has been eventful, and never solely on his personal phrases.
Earlier in 2026, he turned the middle of claims of crypto content suppression by cryptocurrency creators, who reported declining attain. A creator monetization rollback adopted when Elon Musk paused a revenue-sharing overhaul inside hours of announcement.
Bier has additionally mentioned the crypto bot spam problem could also be unsolvable with present know-how. More just lately, he previewed a crypto product on X to rebuild the platform’s relationship with digital property.
The doc he was commenting on carries completely different issues. Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15, the one hundred and thirty fifth anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s foundational textual content on labor and industrialization.
The 42,300-word encyclical on artificial intelligence argues that technological progress with out corresponding moral improvement produces solely a rise in means, with out real human betterment.
Leo presented the text alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah on the Vatican. The product chief’s one-line reply could function a small footnote to that argument.
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