Twitter has banned users from sharing links to their other accounts at numerous competing social media platforms, including Mastodon, Instagram, Facebook, and Post. Elon Musk also suspended journalist Taylor Lorenz’s account without explanation.
Just days after Elon Musk’s Twitter began suspending the accounts of multiple journalists under questionable pretenses, the company has announced that it will begin censoring and suspending Twitter users who share details about their profiles on other social-media platforms.
Amid the endless tumult since Musk acquired the social network, countless Twitter users have been flirting with various alternatives like Mastodon or Post, then sharing the links to those accounts in tweets and their bios. The practice has become particularly common among people who have been critical of Musk’s regularly outlandish behavior and/or the new direction of Twitter under his leadership. But even for users who have not fully fled the platform, posting “where else you can find me” details has emerged as a kind of insurance policy in the event of Twitter’s demise, either due to technical issues following the gutting of the company’s workforce, or any kind of sudden departure of users en masse in response to what Musk is doing to the platform. Now Twitter is apparently forbidding its users from talking about where else they post in what is either an attempt to stave off the exodous, or bitter retaliation against those daring to leave — or both.
We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms.
