Twitter wants you to stay on Twitter. Over the weekend, the social media platform announced it will now ban accounts that promote other social media platforms, from Facebook and Instagram to Truth Social and Mastodon.
Users will also no longer be able to link to those platforms from their account. Twitter CEO Elon Musk tweeted, “Casually sharing occasional links is fine.”
Twitter also suspended a Mastodon account because “the site had promoted the work of a journalist who had been barred from Twitter,” The New York Times reported.
These actions have prompted the European Union to threaten the social media company with severe sanctions for media freedom, per BBC.
“Elon Musk should be aware of that,” Vera Jourova, vice-president for Values and Transparency in the EU Commission, tweeted. “There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”
What is Mastodon?
Mastodon is an alternative social media platform that was launched six years ago.
It can be a little tricky to navigate because it isn’t centralized. It operates from “thousands of individual communities it calls servers,” according to The Washington Post.
When you sign up, you have to choose your server. It’s kind of like picking out the name of your website or an email address. You won’t be siloed to that server community, depending on the one you choose — you can still interact outside of your server.
Once you pick a server and start setting up your profile, you can start using your new Mastodon profile. If you’re interested in trying it out, the best thing to do is to just start experimenting on the platform, and The Washington Post shared a guide on getting started.