Twitter Bans Links to Other Social Media Platforms ⇥ help.twitter.com
At both the Tweet level and the account level, we 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:
Prohibited platforms:
- Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
This is an obviously stupid policy because enforcing it means driving away pretty much everyone. Businesses big and small link to posts they made on Instagram and Facebook, which means a bunch of social media managers are in for a rough start to what is likely their last week of work for the year. Creative people link to their Instagram posts all the time. (Update: Twitter’s policy says it permits cross-posting, even from banned sites like Instagram, but you are somehow not supposed to “promote” those profiles while doing it. You can link to a specific Instagram post, I guess, but not mention your Instagram profile. This seems impossible to enforce.) Meanwhile, I bet Tribel and Nostr are thrilled about being lumped in with successful platforms; they are so small that neither one has a Wikipedia page.
Also, my handle — pretty much everywhere — is just my name. If I tell people they can find me anywhere by searching “nickheer”, I am violating this rule by indicating my handle without a URL.
Maybe more interesting are the exceptions to this rule: linking to one’s YouTube profile is not a bannable offence, and neither is LinkedIn, for some reason. TikTok links are also not prohibited. Oh, and this rule may not apply if you buy ads for a post with a prohibited link, but the wording of that exception is unclear and it could simply mean that Meta is allowed to keep buying ads on Twitter.
Also banned:
- 3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio
It was only earlier this year when Linktree raised a round of funding at a billion-dollar valuation. Time flies.
Twitter is going great, friends, and if you do not think Elon Musk is a business genius for spending $44 billion to buy the company without any plan besides replatforming a bunch of scumbags and banning the account posting trips taken by the SpaceX plane, you just cannot see the eight-dimensional chess game he is playing. He is a very smart man with a thick skin living in his happy multibillion-dollar world, and he is just trying to save civilization by bringing Nazis back and banning people from posting links to their Mastodon account on Twitter, the free speech platform.
Update: Twitter has now removed all evidence of this policy’s existence from its official support channels, but the Internet Archive never forgets. Really gives you confidence this was a well-considered policy from the super genius business person who now owns Twitter.