mccWeek 1: We will finally bring free speech to the Internet
Week 8: Linktree is illegal
Drooling Fan Girl@mcc For anyone else who doesn’t know what linktree is…
“It is also banning links to social media profile aggregators like linktr.ee. These are services that offer a unified page of many social media accounts. Trying to obfuscate the link (such as replacing the . in the URL with ‘dot’) will also be considered as violations.”
Twitter bans users from linking to other social media platforms like Instagram and Mastodon
On Sunday, during the World Cup, Twitter officially banned its users from linking to their profiles on other social media sites like Mastodon, Facebook and Instagram. Mentions of other platform handles are also now banned. The policy means Twitter users flocking to Mastodon are now longer allowed to tell their followers to go there instead, […]
Robin Metcalfe 🍞@drooling_fan_girl @mcc I’m looking forward to seeing them try to moderate a *ban on link obfuscation* with their skeleton moderation crew!
I feel for the Twitter devs tonight. “Build me a system that can detect any possible attempt to put any variation of these URLs anywhere on the site”. Good grief!
@toastymctoast @drooling_fan_girl A few days ago when the mastodon blocks started someone made a link shortener that blocks the user-agent for the Twitter link-testing bot. They named it "spacekaren.sucks" for maximum unsubtlety. You can just feed your mastodon, linktree, whatever link into the shortener and Twitter's blocking on post/malware-warning on click does not fire. Twitter has not caught on to this.
@mcc @drooling_fan_girl Haha, I saw that one, I was tempted to use it! The thing is too, I can't imagine they have anywhere near the staff/capacity to moderate content on a level like that either. Domains for link shorteners are essentially unlimited.
Even if they got $8 subscribers to report infringements (wouldn't put it past him), that's massively time consuming to deal with esp. after firing most of the employees. It's a daft policy from any angle!
@toastymctoast @drooling_fan_girl What I've seen people expressing fear about is it will basically be a form of arbitrary bans via selective enforcement— anytime an alt right person reports someone they get banned, because everyone's promoting offsite social media in some way. But they were already arbitrarily banning people as they displeased Musk, so I'm not sure we'd be able to tell the difference if that happened.
@drooling_fan_girl @mcc Yep, that was my concern, that it’s essentially just another nonsense reason to add to the list for when they want to kick more journalists off the platform or silence any marginalised group.
I think it all just plays into his obsessive desire to spread confusion, stay relevant. Familiar Tr**p tactics.