(Presidentialwire.com)- On December 18, Twitter declared that it would stop allowing “free promotion” of specific social media networks on its platform, such as Facebook and Truth Social, before appearing to reverse its position.
Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Nostr, and Post are just a few of the platforms that Twitter Support noted would remove any free promotion of at both the tweet and the account levels, including linking out via the use of URLs.
The list did not include the video-sharing website TikTok, owned by the Chinese company ByteDance Ltd.
The choice represented the most significant policy shift at Twitter since billionaire Elon Musk assumed control in October.
But it quickly sparked a backlash from Twitter users, including Jack Dorsey, the platform’s co-founder and former CEO, who recently invested in social media startup Nostr. In a tweet posted on Sunday, Dorsey claimed that Twitter’s new policy “doesn’t make sense.”
Shortly after the new policy was announced, Paul Graham, a well-known computer scientist, venture capitalist, and the creator of the start-up accelerator Y Combinator, tweeted a link to his website and announced that he would be posting on Mastodon.
“This is the breaking point. On my website, there is a link to my new Mastodon profile,” Graham wrote. Shortly after, his Twitter account was deleted.
Musk later explained that he was loosening the new rule on Twitter, just hours after Twitter announced the new policy.
Musk agreed with The Quartering, a news and content organization that told people they can’t link to their Instagram is “way too far.”
The businessman concluded that the policy would be changed to suspend accounts only when their main objective was to advertise Twitter’s social media rivals, which, according to Musk, essentially fell under Twitter’s no spam policy.
Later, Musk tweeted: “There will be a vote for significant policy changes. I apologize. Won’t occur once more.”
Since then, Graham’s Twitter account has been recovered.
Later, Musk asked Twitter users if they thought he should “step down as head of Twitter.”
Musk wrote, “I will follow the findings of this poll.”
The poll received 10,277,839 votes late Sunday night, with 56.3 percent of Twitter users voting “yes” and 43.7 percent voting “no.”
