Twitter’s journey, since Elon Musk’s acquisition, has been a rocky ride filled with a series of events. Adding to the existing long list of these events is a new episode now at Twitter. The company, after deleting Mastodon’s official account, decided to ban all accounts posting handles and links to other rival social media platforms like Instagram and Facebook. However, after facing backlash over these new changes, the company has now taken down all tweets that talked about the ban and also deactivated the official page that outlined the new policy changes.
For those who were enjoying the FIFA world cup last night or were busy enjoying the weekend and have no clue of what happened at Twitter in those few hours, here is a recap. Twitter on Sunday decided to go tough on its competitors and announced to ban links promoting other social media accounts. Along with Mastodon which has lately become the most preferred alternative to Twitter, Musk’s company banned links to many other popular social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Tribel and so on.
It basically meant that users could no longer put links to their other social media profiles in their Twitter bio or any tweet.
“Casually sharing occasional links is fine, but no more relentless advertising of competitors for free, which is absurd in the extreme,” Elon Musk tweeted.
Twitter, a few days back, banned ElonJet- the account used publicly available data to track Musk’s flights. The company, hours after the ban, also updated its private information page preventing the sharing of a person’s live location. The move faced heavy criticism from users with many reminding Musk of one of his November’s tweets that talked about his “commitment to free speech” which extended to not banning even those accounts that tracked his plane and posed a direct “personal safety risk” to him. Along with banning ElonJet and its creator Jack Sweeney’s Twitter account, Musk also suspended the official account of Mastodon after the latter shared a tweet promoting Sweeney’s Mastodon account.
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