Elon Musk's Twitter Blocks Links to Social Media Rival Mastodon

Elon Musk’s Twitter has reportedly begun blocking links to many major Mastodon servers, one of the most popular Twitter alternatives, marking the site as “potentially harmful.”

The Verge reports that Twitter has begun blocking users from tweeting links to many major servers for Mastodon, a rival social media platform. The ban appeared to be enacted at some point in the past few days of chaos at Twitter, during which Elon Musk banned the @ElonJet account that tracks Musk’s private jet — despite his previous promise not to do so due to his love of free speech — and a number of the journalists that reported on the ban.

Users that attempt to tweet certain links to Mastodon will receive an error message stating: “We can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful.” The Verge reports that Twitter is currently blocking links to the original mastodon.social server as well as over 10 other domains.

In a recent Twitter Spaces chatroom hosted by BuzzFeed News tech reporter Katie Notopoulos, Musk was asked about the banning of multiple journalists over their coverage and tweets about the suspension of the @ElonJet account.

Musk said: “Well, as I’m sure everyone who’s been doxxed would agree, sharing real time information about somebody’s location is inappropriate and I’m sure that everyone on this call would not like that to be done to them. And there’s not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists and regular people, everyone’s going to be treated the same, you’re not special because you’re a journalist, you’re a Twitter citizen. So no special treatment. You dox, you get suspended end of story. And ban evasion or trying to be clever about it, like ‘oh I posted a link to the real-time information is obviously somebody trying to evade the meaning.”

Holy Shit. Elon Musk just popped into a Twitter Spaces chat with a bunch of journalists. He was called out by journalist Drew Harrell, who he banned, for lying about posting links to his private information, then leaves almost immediately after being pressed. Here is the exchange pic.twitter.com/wVA9Gb5MVJ

— Bradley Eversley (@ForeverEversley) December 16, 2022

On Thursday, Mastodon’s official Twitter account was suspended, and while the reason for this suspension has not yet been made public it appears that the ban happened shortly after the accounts tweeted a link to the @ElonJet page on the website.