Twitter will not permit customers to advertise their presence on sure social platforms, together with Fb, Instagram, Mastodon, Fact Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Put up. In a post outlining these changes, Twitter says it should take motion in opposition to customers that violate this coverage “at each the Tweet stage and the account stage.”
This implies customers can not embrace hyperlinks to their profiles on different social networks of their Twitter bio, nor can they ship out tweets directing customers to take a look at their Instagram or Fb accounts. The coverage doesn’t simply embrace hyperlinks from different platforms, both; it even extends to posting usernames or handles from competing platforms with out URLs.
Moreover, customers can not tweet out posts from banned platforms except it’s a cross-post, that means the identical put up must be shared to each the competing website and Twitter. Twitter may droop accounts “used for the primary function of selling content material on one other social platform,” and can not permit customers to hyperlink to third-party hyperlink aggregators, like Linktree or Lnk.bio. Regardless of all this, Twitter remains to be nice with the paid promotion of those banned platforms (though this function doesn’t seem to be available yet):
We acknowledge that sure social media platforms present various experiences to Twitter, and permit customers to put up content material to Twitter from these platforms. Generally, any sort of cross-posting to our platform is just not in violation of this coverage, even from the prohibited websites listed above. Moreover, we permit paid commercial/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms.
Twitter says it should take away any tweets that include violations of the coverage, and will quickly droop customers with hyperlinks to banned social platforms of their profiles. It is going to additionally take motion in opposition to customers who attempt to get round this coverage by cloaking URLs to different platforms or “spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use ‘.’ within the names to keep away from URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your deal with on a prohibited social media platform.”
Different platforms, like Telegram, TikTok, YouTube, Weibo, and OnlyFans stay protected from the Twitter ban for now, and the motivation behind banning hyperlinks to sure networks and never others isn’t clear.
Twitter already blocks hyperlinks to Twitter competitors Mastodon at a platform stage. Making an attempt to tweet out a hyperlink to a number of Mastodon servers or the positioning itself ends in an error message, stating: “We are able to’t full this request as a result of this hyperlink has been recognized by Twitter or our companions as being probably dangerous.” We don’t know whether or not Twitter will finally disable hyperlinks from the banned platforms in an identical method, however right now of writing, it appears customers are nonetheless in a position to put up hyperlinks from these networks.
In response to Twitter Help’s thread in regards to the new coverage, former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, replied “Why?” Dorsey lately donated round $245,000 to the event of the decentralized social community Nostr, which is included in Twitter’s ban. Dorsey says Twitter’s block on the community “doesn’t make sense,” and presently has his Nostr username listed in his Twitter bio, probably placing him prone to suspension. The Verge reached out to Twitter for extra details about its new insurance policies however didn’t instantly hear again.
This all follows a chaotic week for Twitter that noticed the suspension of quite a few journalists — together with CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and The New York Instances’ Ryan Mac — after they tweeted about @ElonJet, a now-banned Twitter account that tracked the situation of the billionaire’s non-public jet. Musk claims the journalists “doxxed” his location, and later had Twitter implement a coverage that bans “stay location info,” in addition to “hyperlinks to Third-party URL(s) of journey routes.” Whereas Musk later reinstated a lot of the banned accounts after polling customers on whether or not Twitter ought to carry their suspensions, he briefly suspended The Washington Put up reporter Taylor Lorenz for “prior doxxing action.”
Replace, 2:39PM ET: Up to date so as to add Dorsey’s response and extra context surrounding his funding in Nostr.