Musk’s Twitter says customers can now not hyperlink to Fb or Instagram

It’s the most recent transfer by Twitter’s new proprietor Elon Musk to crack down on sure speech after he shut down a Twitter account final week that was monitoring the flights of his personal jet.

“We all know that a lot of our customers could also be energetic on different social media platforms; nonetheless, going ahead, Twitter will now not permit free promotion of particular social media platforms on Twitter,” the corporate mentioned in a press release.

The banned platforms embody mainstream web sites corresponding to Fb and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Submit and former President Donald Trump’s Reality Social. Twitter gave no clarification for why the blacklist included these seven web sites however not others corresponding to Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.

Twitter can be banning promotions of third-party social media hyperlink aggregators corresponding to Linktree, which some folks use to indicate the place they are often discovered on completely different web sites.

Twitter beforehand took motion in opposition to one of many rivals, Mastodon, after its essential Twitter account tweeted in regards to the @ElonJet controversy final week. Mastodon has grown quickly in current weeks as a substitute for Twitter customers who’re sad with Musk’s overhaul of Twitter since he purchased the corporate for $44 billion in late October and started restoring accounts that ran afoul of the earlier Twitter management’s guidelines in opposition to hateful conduct and different harms.

Workarounds are banned, too

Some Twitter customers have included hyperlinks to their new Mastodon profile and inspired followers to search out them there. That’s now banned on Twitter, as are makes an attempt to bypass restrictions corresponding to by spelling out “instagram dot com” and a username as an alternative of a direct web site hyperlink.

Instagram and Fb father or mother firm Meta didn’t instantly return a request for remark Sunday.

Musk completely banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then modified Twitter’s guidelines to ban the sharing of one other particular person’s present location with out their consent. He then took goal at journalists who had been writing in regards to the jet-tracking account, which may nonetheless be discovered on different websites together with Mastodon, Fb, Instagram and Reality Social, alleging that they had been broadcasting “principally assassination coordinates.”

Twitter final week suspended the accounts of quite a few journalists who cowl the social media platform and Musk, amongst them reporters working for The New York Instances, Washington Submit, CNN, Voice of America and different publications. Lots of these accounts had been restored following an internet ballot by Musk.

Then, over the weekend, The Washington Submit’s Taylor Lorenz turned the most recent journalist to be briefly banned from Twitter.

Lorenz mentioned she and one other Submit expertise reporter had been researching an article regarding Musk. She had tried to speak with the billionaire however the makes an attempt went unanswered, so she tried to contact him Saturday by posting a message on Twitter tagging Musk and requesting an interview.

The particular subject was not disclosed within the tweet, though it was in response to Musk tweeting about an alleged incident earlier within the week involving a “violent stalker” in Southern California and Musk’s complaints about journalists allegedly revealing his household’s location by referencing the jet-tracker account.

When she went again later Saturday to test whether or not there was a response on Twitter, Lorenz was met with a notification that her account was “completely suspended.”

“I received’t say I didn’t anticipate it,” Lorenz mentioned in a cellphone interview early Sunday with The Related Press. She mentioned she wasn’t given a particular motive for the ban.

Sally Buzbee, The Washington Submit’s govt editor, mentioned in a written assertion Sunday that the “arbitrary suspension of one other Submit journalist additional undermines Elon Musk’s declare that he intends to run Twitter as a platform devoted to free speech.

“Once more, the suspension occurred with no warning, course of or clarification — this time as our reporter merely sought remark from Musk for a narrative,” Buzbee mentioned. “Submit journalists must be reinstated instantly, with out arbitrary situations.“

By noon Sunday, Lorenz’s account was restored, as was the tweet she thought had triggered her suspension.

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