Twitter doesn’t want people sharing Instagram photos

Twitter and Instagram always seem to be at each other’s throats, and now Twitter is taking things one step further by asking notable tweeters to share pictures directly rather than linking to Instagram.

You may remember that back in 2012, Instagram changed how linked images showed up on Twitter. Rather than seeing a preview, users have to click on a link that takes them to the photo on Instagram. That clearly didn’t sit well with Twitter, because not long afterwards it launched photo editing tools, like filters, to try and encourage people to share via Twitter rather than Instagram. Fast forward to today and it’s upping its game.

Some of Twitter’s biggest users (the ones with the big blue verification tick) will now start seeing pop-up messages encouraging them to share photos directly through Twitter, instead of linking to Instagram. The idea seems to be that if celebrities start ditching Instagram links, regular users will follow suit.

From a user perspective, it would make things easier if all the images could be viewed within Twitter itself. Then again Instagram is incredibly popular, and it might have a hard time trying to convince users not to share links as tweets.