Twitter suspends account encouraging others to join Mastodon

The Twitter account tricking people into joining the rival social network Mastodon has been suspended, the latest in a series of suspended accounts this week.

The usual diet for @JoinMastodon was replaced on Thursday with a message that the account had been suspended for violating Twitter rules.

Some Twitter users have also reported that the platform is interfering with links to Mastodon. CNET testing on Friday showed that clicking on an existing Mastodon link on Twitter brought up a warning that the link was “potentially spammy or dangerous.” An option at the bottom of the warning allows you to ignore the alert and click on the competitor site. But it no longer seems possible to tweet a Mastodon link: an attempt to do so triggered an error message stating that the link was “potentially dangerous”.

It was not immediately clear what rules the suspended account had violated or why the Mastodon links were labeled as potentially dangerous. Neither Twitter nor Mastodon immediately responded to requests for comment.

Twitter has been somewhat chaotic since Musk completed his purchase of Twitter on Oct. 27. About half of Twitter’s staff was fired just days after Musk took over, and the site briefly launched a new “blue check” verification service to be plagued by trolls and fake “verified” accounts.

The suspension of the Mastodon account comes as many people are opting out of Twitter in favor of the decentralized social network built on open source software. In the first two weeks after buying Musk, Mastodon gained 1 million new users, said Mastodon creator Eugen Rochko. That brings the network’s total to around 1.6 million active users, which is still a tiny fraction of Twitter’s 238 million.

Launched in October 2016, Mastodon is a free social media service like Twitter. But unlike Twitter, Mastodon isn’t a single website: it’s a decentralized network of thousands of websites talking to each other. Users create an account on a specific Mastodon server, or “instance”, but they are not limited to tracking people and posts on that server.

The suspension came one day after Twitter suspended a handful of accounts on the site that use publicly available flight information to track the location of private jets, including the plane used by Twitter owner Elon Musk. On the same day, Twitter updated its privacy policy to prohibit posting or linking to information about a person’s physical location or travel itinerary, whether or not that information is publicly available. .