Amid the chaos that greeted the platform’s decision to suspend some journalists over alleged policy violations, Twitter has again announced it will be punishing users who share links to other rival social media networks on its platform.
Some of the affected platforms are Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post. Link-in-bio tools like Linktree and Lnk.Bio were not left out of the ban either.
According to a post made via Twitter’s blog site, the platform confirmed it will “remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL”.
What this means is that Twitter users who include links to their user profiles on the prohibited social networks will be in violation of this policy.
Twitter also warned against any attempts made by users to bypass the restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms using technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) adding that such an attempt was in violation of the policy.
Recall Twitter had earlier placed some journalists and its rival, Mastodon under ban after the social media app was found to have violated the platform’s policy on doxxing (Sharing the live location of another user on the platform).
According to The Verge, a Twitter spokesperson had revealed that the journalists’ ban was related to the live sharing of location data by a now-suspended account known as @Elonjet.
Although no official detail was given as reasons for Mastodon’s suspension, the platform’s Twitter account, @joinmastodon had also shared a link showing the new Mastodon account details of the now-suspended account – @Elonjet.
According to Twitter, punishment for violating this policy ranges from requiring the deletion of one or more Tweets to temporarily locking account(s).