Twitter announces ban on accounts promoting other social media platforms; retracts hours later

In a new diktat, social media platform Twitter recently announced that it will no longer allow free promotion of other social networking platforms. In a tweet thread, the Twitter Support account posted that the social media platform will remove accounts that have been created solely for the purpose of promoting other social platforms. It also includes accounts promoting content that contains links or usernames for platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr and Post.

This update was met with strong reaction from several quarters. French government official, Éric Freyssinet, the deputy director of France's Cyberspace Gendarmerie Command even tweeted that by enforcing such measure, Twitter would lose protection against civil and criminal legal liabilities. He said that removing tweets that links to other social media accounts (that do not violate any law) would make Twitter an editorial media with “civil and criminal liability for *any* illegal content therein.”

Twitter removed the tweet and blog announcing account blocking just a few hours later. Meanwhile, the Twitter Safety handle has now started a new poll. This poll is prompting users to vote whether or not the social media platform should have a policy to prevent ‘the creation of or use of existing accounts for the main purpose of advertising other social media platforms.’

Last week, Twitter suspended the accounts of a few journalists including Taylor Lorenz and Drew Harwell from the Washington Post, Ryan Mac from the New York Times, and Donie O’Sullivan of CNN.  However, after being criticised heavily for this move, Twitter reinstated the accounts of these users. In separate news, Musk initiated a new poll on whether he should step down from his post at Twitter. At the time of writing this piece, over 55% of the users voted in the favor of him stepping down.

At the backdrop of what is happening at Twitter, other social media platforms have been gaining much traction. Leading is the decentralised social network Mastodon. In just four days after Elon Musk acquired Twitter, Mastodon gained a record 120,000 new users.