Twitter Inc. said it would no longer allow “free promotion of certain social media platforms” on its sites, the latest change to its content-moderation rules under billionaire Elon Musk, The Wall Street Journal reported.
“Specifically, we will remove accounts created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms and content that contains links or usernames for the following platforms: Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribal, Nostr, and Post,” Twitter said Sunday, in a series of tweets from company account @TwitterSocial.
The Wall Street Journal reported that Twitter also updated its website to describe the new policy, which said that the company could take actions such as temporary locking or permanently suspending accounts that violated it.
Late Sunday, The Wall Street Journal stated, the tweets from @TwitterSupport and a note on the company’s website announcing the policy against promoting other social-media platforms appeared to have been deleted. Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment about the disappearance of the policy note on its website and the tweets.
The Verge reported that other platforms, like Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, Weibo and OnlyFans remained safe from the Twitter ban for now, and the motivation behind banning links to certain networks and not others isn’t clear.
According to The Verge, Twitter already blocks links to Twitter competitor Mastodon at a platform level. Trying to tweet out a link to several Mastodon servers or the site itself results in an error message, stating: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.”
The Verge also reported that former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey replied “Why?” In response to Twitter Support’s thread about the new policy. Dorsey recently donated around $245,000 to the development of the decentralized social network Nostr, which is included in Twitter’s ban. Dorsey says Twitter’s block on Nostr “doesn’t make sense,” and currently has his Nostr username listed in his Twitter bio.
TechCrunch reported that the Twitter Safety account started a poll asking users if the company should form a policy on accounts used just to promote other social networks.
The @TwitterSafety is titled: “Should we have a policy preventing the creation of or use of existing accounts for the main purpose of advertising other social media platforms?”
The options were Yes or No. At the time I am writing this, No has 86% of votes, and Yes has 14% of votes. There are 19 hours left for people to vote in this poll.
In my opinion, Twitter has become extremely chaotic since Elon Musk became CEO. The Twitter Safety policy prohibiting people from posting links to other social media platforms appeared – and was removed – in a very short span of time. This sort of behavior is going to make Twitter users uneasy because policy is changing so quickly that they cannot ever be sure what is allowed and what isn’t.