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Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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New Twitter policy just dropped:

Promotion of alternative social platforms policy

...

What is a violation of this policy?

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

3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio

Examples:

“follow me @username on Instagram”

“username@mastodon.social”

“check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”

Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended. Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy. This includes, but is not limited to, spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use “.” in the names to avoid URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your handle on a prohibited social media platform.

It's like the man himself says

The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!

ETA:

Seems like some large accounts are calling Twitter's bluff. Dril posted a link to their linktree hours ago and so far both post and account are still up.

ETA2:

Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.

ETA3:

The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.

So he is basically trying to prevent competing social media networks from using his network to gain market share and the claim is basically hypocrisy?

Is the argument this is a free speech issue? It isn’t so different from Apple’s closed system approach. Whether it makes economic sense … well that’s a different question.

He said anything that isn't illegal should be allowed on Twitter.

Context is everything. It would be like someone putting up trade secrets and Twitter taking it down. Musk’s context was about not censoring political speech. Here there is no censor; it is just trying to limit competition from using twitters network to gain market share. Don’t be strict constructionists; find the meaning.

I don't think it was at all implied that it referred only to political speech, particularly when the most common types of speech people would get in trouble for included things like racism and misinformation.

Expect what is racism or misinformation is inherently political.