Dec. 19th, 2022 20:03
5 days of Twitter
In the past five days,
- Twitter banned the @elonjet account, as well as the personal account of its creator/maintainer.
- The ElonJetTracker subreddit was started, and gained 200K subscribers in the next 4 days.
- News articles about the @elonjet suspension got discussed on twitter, and some journalists talked about it on twitter and linked to some articles about the issue.
- Twitter suspended the accounts of various journalists who had talked about this, including ones from CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post. The UN and EU condemned twitter's banning of journalists.
- Suspended journalists got together on a twitter group voice chat thing called "spaces", invited Elon Musk, and asked him a bunch of questions. He evaded answering many and told them they had all doxxed him. and left.
- Twitter, realizing that suspended accounts can use spaces, disabled the feature shortly after he got off the call, and for the next several days.
- Elon Musk posted a twitter poll asking when the journalists should be reinstanted and most voters wanted it done soon. He cancelled it and posted a new poll, but again a majority wanted the journalists reinstated quickly.
- Twitter reinstated several of the journalists' accounts.
- Without announcing it, twitter quietly started treating links to mastodon content as malware, blocking people from posting such links.
- ... but since mastodon is not one company or domain, links to lots of smaller mastodon servers continued to work.
- Twitter banned the account @joinmastodon, which promoted moving to mastodon from twitter.
- A super-sloppy article on mediaite claimed twitter banned mastodon's founder, "John Mastodon", apparently misreading "@joinmastodon" and making assumptions. They later corrected that bit of their article, but too late - "John Mastodon" is now a meme. And their stupid article still says "competing social media company Mastodon" so they still don't realize it's not a company.
- Twitter suddenly announced a new policy, no promotion of or linking to any of the social media services they listed (a list which included both Facebook and Trump's Truth Social, but did not include tiktok ... huh.) No linking to them in your profile either, and no using link shorteners or descriptions of URLs to get around the ban.
- Elon Musk posted a poll asking whether he should step down as head of twitter. Majority say yes.
- The next day after their social media promotion ban, twitter cancelled the policy, and instead posted a poll from an official twitter account asking whether they should have such a policy. No overwhelmingly wins.
What's next?