The controversy continues a day after Twitter developed a new policy to justify its decision to remove an account that follows Elon Musk’s private plane.
Mastodon, Twitter’s open source rival, seems to have been removed from the site on Thursday afternoon. According to records, Mastodon (@joinmastodon) tweeted a link to the jet tracking account on its own service just before it was suspended.
As of 6:30 p.m. PT, many Mastodon URLs no longer function on Twitter, which labels them as “possibly dangerous.” In our testing, tweeted URLs to certain servers without Mastodon’s name in the domain seemed to function. Domains such as mstdn.social and mastodon.social have been blocked, although connections to journa.host and others continue to operate.
As the Twitter alternative gained traction, many users included a Mastodon profile link in their biographies. Any links to blacklisted Mastodon servers are now removed, with the warning “Warning: this link may be hazardous.”
Twitter has banned access to other Mastodon servers that do not have the service in the domain name as of 8 p.m. PT, including journa.host and SciComm.xyz.
Florida student Jack Sweeney runs the now-banned Twitter account @ElonJet, as well as a number of other flight-tracking bots that aggregate flight information from public sources. Sweeney’s personal Twitter account was also suspended, as were several of the bots, including one that provided updates on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg.
Musk had a different tone about the account in early November, but he’s subsequently backtracked, modifying Twitter’s platform standards to reflect his own tastes. “My dedication to free expression extends even to not blocking the account that is tracking my aircraft, despite the fact that it poses a direct personal safety risk,” he tweeted. That tweet is now followed by messages from the community explaining the @ElonJet story.
Since the company’s hands-on new owner came aboard, Musk’s personal and political inclinations have informed a number of Twitter policy changes. While Musk originally said that Twitter would accept any non-illegal speech, he has now blocked particular accounts for personal reasons.
Musk restored a slew of high-profile Nazis and white supremacists earlier this month, but he refused to reinstate Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, citing his own parenthood experience.
A single person cannot define the rules for the whole network on Mastodon, a federated, open source Twitter competitor. Mastodon’s servers, which are independent but open instances of the social network, are governed by people who may impose rules, but users can easily decamp to another server if they disagree with those decisions.