X Debunks Popular Engagement Myth on Pope Leo’s Tweet

X Head of Product Nikita Bier debunked a persistent social media myth on May 31, directly telling the Vatican’s account that embedding a link in an X post does not reduce its reach.

The exchange followed @Pontifex, the Vatican’s official account, which posted an excerpt from Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, with a link to the full text on vatican.va. A user replied, advising the Pope to append the URL in a threaded reply for better algorithmic performance.

X Head of Product Steps In

Bier entered the thread with a single-line response addressed to the head of the Catholic Church:

“Hey Pope, this isn’t true. Links will not deboost your post.”

As Head of Product, Bier thus oversees X’s ranking and recommendation architecture. His correction, therefore, carries as much official weight as any public statement on the subject can carry.

The belief that linking to off-platform destinations suppresses a post’s reach has circulated widely for years. This has pushed many social media teams toward workarounds like reply-threading links.

Hey Pope, this isn’t true. Links will not deboost your post.

— Nikita Bier (@nikitabier) May 31, 2026

Bier joined X in mid-2025 after building TBH and Gas, two viral social apps acquired by Facebook and Discord. His first year on the platform has been eventful, and not entirely on his own terms.

Earlier in 2026, he became the center of claims of crypto content suppression by cryptocurrency creators, who reported declining reach. A creator monetization rollback followed when Elon Musk paused a revenue-sharing overhaul within hours of announcement.

Bier has also said the crypto bot spam problem may be unsolvable with existing technology. More recently, he previewed a crypto product on X to rebuild the platform’s relationship with digital assets.

The document he was commenting on carries different concerns. Pope Leo XIV signed Magnifica Humanitas on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, Pope Leo XIII’s foundational text on labor and industrialization.

The 42,300-word encyclical on artificial intelligence argues that technological progress without corresponding ethical development produces only an increase in means, without genuine human betterment.

Leo presented the text alongside Anthropic co-founder Christopher Olah at the Vatican. The product chief’s one-line reply may serve as a small footnote to that argument.