Twitter Just Banned Linking To Your Other Socials

The new policy was announced just as Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz’s account was restored after being suspended Saturday night. At the time of her suspension, Lorenz had deleted all but three tweets, two of which encouraged people to follow her elsewhere. The third tweet was Lorenz replying to Elon Musk, asking him to comment on a story she had emailed him about.

“As someone who covers content creators, I am pretty shocked by this policy because it’s very hostile to influencers,” Lorenz told BuzzFeed News. “Cross-promotion on social media is necessary.”

Earlier this week, Twitter suspended the accounts of several other journalists, including tech reporter Drew Harwell, also of the Washington Post, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times and formerly BuzzFeed News. The suspensions were related to links involving the account @ElonJet, an account that tweeted out the flight tracking of Musk’s private plane. After saying that he would continue to allow the bot earlier this fall, Musk suspended it this week. After a Twitter poll, most of the suspended journalists had their accounts reinstated.

Twitter also suspended the official account for the social platform Mastodon this week, in addition to disabling links to it.