Twitter CEO Elon Musk has determined it will not enable free of charge promotion on the platform, which principally quantities to posting the deal with of an account on a unique social media website. The platform introduced the unusual new coverage on Sunday in a collection of tweets.
“We acknowledge that lots of our customers are energetic on different social media platforms. Nonetheless, we’ll now not enable free promotion of sure social media platforms on Twitter,” posted the Twitter assist account. “Particularly, we’ll take away accounts created solely for the aim of selling different social platforms and content material that incorporates hyperlinks or usernames for the next platforms: Fb, Instagram, Mastodon, Fact Social, Tribel, Nostr and Put up.”
Different social websites like Onlyfans, Patreon, Reddit, Substack, Tiktok, and Tumblr weren’t listed by Twitter and it’s presumed that customers can nonetheless hyperlink their accounts to these platforms.
So principally, you possibly can’t promote Twitter’s obvious opponents. The actual limits of the coverage are nonetheless considerably unclear however evidently a person can’t even publish the deal with of an account on a type of websites. In different phrases, you possibly can’t publish “comply with me at @username on Instagram.”
“We nonetheless enable cross-posting content material from any social media platform,” the Twitter Assist account posted. “Posting hyperlinks or usernames to social media platforms not listed above are additionally not in violation of this coverage.”
Twitter adopted up by posting the small print of the coverage, saying that linking out to these websites will likely be barred at each the tweet and account ranges. It additionally clarified that utilizing a hyperlink aggregator reminiscent of linktr.ee and lnk.bio can be banned as nicely.
Twitter additionally mentioned it might ban posting usernames even in case you do not really hyperlink out however nonetheless direct customers to different social media accounts.
“Moreover, any makes an attempt to bypass restrictions on exterior hyperlinks to the above prohibited social media platforms via technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this coverage,” Twitter wrote. “This contains, however isn’t restricted to, 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.”
It’s really a wild new coverage, particularly as a result of Musk claims to be a free speech absolutist. Twitter is seemingly so involved about shedding customers that it will not even enable customers to acknowledge their existence.
The punishment for violating the coverage is fairly sturdy.
“We could take a variety of actions starting from requiring deletion of a number of Tweets to briefly locking account(s),” Twitter wrote. “Any subsequent offenses will end in everlasting suspension.” The identical goes for posting these accounts in your bio.
Issues have been unusual on Twitter. Musk, as an example, simply suspended a bunch of journalists who cowl him. Now, he is banning posting that you simply exist on different social websites.
