Promotion of Alternative Social Platforms Policy

New Twitter’s policy bans user links to other “competing” social platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other. This is totally against free speech in a platform that so much advocates this notion.

Twitter Support on Sunday 2022.12.18 tweeted: “We recognize that many of our users are active on other social media platforms. However, we will no longer allow free promotion of certain social media platforms on Twitter.”

This Tweet has afterwards been deleted and the policy page which was detailing this new rule has been removed as well (https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platforms-policy).

There was a huge outcry of the public and it seems they backed down already. Thankfully, the power is still in the public hands but it is frightening what an entity (corporation, organisation or person) with much power can do. A twitter that continuously changes rules & policies based on self-promotion motives and suspending / banning accounts that fail to comply is a major blow to free speech. I cannot notice how much it resembles an authoritarian regime and makes me very pessimistic about the future.

Decentralisation can be the answer to a system that the few can amass enormous power and control the flow of information. For social media, such an alternative can be Mastodon, a decentralized alternative social media platform that is free & without ads. As far as I am concerned, I am seriously thinking quitting Twitter in favor of Mastodon. For the record, today also marks my 13th birthday as a Twitter user.