Dr. Casey FieslerThis is completely unhinged. I am officially done with the bird site. Thanks to everyone who followed me here, you'll be seeing even more of me.
MichelleSo what is absolute madness about this policy from Twitter (which I'm sure the chief twit crafted himself) is that (a) I assume the point is to keep people from leaving Twitter and going to other platforms instead; and (b) I'm guessing that for many people, like me, this will be the final straw that causes them to officially leave Twitter.
LOLOLOL. Like 12 hours later, Twitter’s “Promotion of Alternative Social Media Platform Policy” is just gone. Along with all the tweets from Twitter Support about it that had over 100k RTs. Without a word. Just like, oh maybe they’ll all just think they dreamed it. What an absolute circus. Anyway, welcome new folks. :) #twittermigration
Really excellent job with that Twitter policy designed to keep people from finding out about alternative social media platforms. Graph from @mastodonusercount just before midnight ET 12/18/22.
Deinonychus@cfiesler It is honestly impressive at this point
John Panzer@cfiesler @mastodonusercount A perfectly executed operation all around.
mel tullly@cfiesler it led me to use one of the migration tools and actually get the mastodon app on my phone. Good job guys 🫠
Ziggy the Hamster ☎️ 4ZTH
Cheryl Platz 
@cfiesler @mastodonusercount the old “measuring the quantity changes the quantity” scientific phenomenon rears its head on Elon’s stop loss attempts 😂
Jessie@cfiesler @mastodonusercount Hey I’m one of those data points!
Kat@cfiesler Eventually I’ll be moved off of Twitter. My goal is by my birthday.
scottmoore@cfiesler and I now have "Obey the Moderator" by Optimus Rhyme running through my head.
Brian C. Keegan, Ph.D.@cfiesler You’re welcome and I’m sorry: https://hci.social/@bkeegan/109538770841350344
@bkeegan hahahaha perfection
Chet Faliszek@cfiesler If Musk had come in with a vision, a plan and said, these are the beliefs I have and how I want to run this... there could have been discussion, but now? Who knows, if he stubs his toe tomorrow and sees the color blue, they will ban the color blue.
German Vidal
@cfiesler Not even a post acknowledging the deletion. Complete Homer backing into the hedge at scale. Absolute bananas.
And yet they’re still programmatically calling Masto links “malware” when you try to add them back to profiles…
Bianca@cfiesler Fine tuned machine.
littlegreyfish@cfiesler The sheer childishness happening on this scale is wild. Evil, fascism, censorship are nothing new. But this feels different, like someone having a public mental/emotional breakdown.
John Caveney woke is me🛠️
MargaretThis is good. Because hunting down everyone who (like me) had left twatter with a note in their biog saying where they’d gone was just stupid and unenforceable.
Hope 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️🏴 SNP@cfiesler quite a few legal experts came forward and said Twitter could become liable for toxic content if this became policy…🤔
Jonas Nordlund@cfiesler Too bad that I already deactivated my account there. I may still reactivate it in the future, but that's contingent on who is running their show. For now, their policy changes back and forth don't matter to me -- the intent and their direction is more clear and resolute than ever.
Fubaroque@cfiesler I just love the sound of fresh policies... shattering.
(I won't be back on Twitter though. Oh and neither will the Twitter share buttons be back on our website. 🤔 😘)
Prof Maz Hardey 🌳
Anne Sullivan@cfiesler Yep, it had that exact effect on me. I knew I should leave, but I was being lazy. But this? 100000 times stronger than any inertia I may have been experiencing.
Geosminn (Travis)@cfiesler My twitter usename is my mastodon handle. Waitin' for them to come for me now. Its a dare.
Mathias Hellquist 🤘 @cfiesler sometimes we just have to take #SpaceKarens word at face value. Like in this tweet for example.
@mathias I mean that tweet from Twitter Support isn't even what their policy says. It literally says that individual tweets will be removed for e.g. [email protected]
@cfiesler yeah, I am thinking there probably are some quite confused staff over at Twitter right now trying to make heads or tails of what Mr BossMan actually means and if that is the same as what he says.
Ben Ross@cfiesler the most wrong-headed part is that many people, like me, who have already included this information in our bios, are going to be suspended for it. And with me, like many of them, there is zero chance that I'm going to delete it to exit suspension.
Desert Dweller 🌵@cfiesler It's also absolute proof (like any thinking human ever really needed it) that he has NO idea what drove that platform in the first place.
Steven L. Johnson@cfiesler A few days ago a user who joined my local server said that it was Elon blocking links to Mastodon that convinced them it was worth joining.
And, it's a great advertisement for Mastodon that it's listed immediately after FB and IG.
@steven that is a great point :)
James Grimmelmann@cfiesler This is literally the #1 Chicago School argument against antitrust liability for unilateral exclusionary conduct.
@jtlg ok IF you don't mind could you say a little more or point me to something - this sounds very interesting but antitrust law isn't super in my wheelhouse :)
@cfiesler The argument is that unilateral exclusionary conduct is ultimately self-defeating, because it costs the defendant more to implement than it can gain them if successful. Closing off your network to competitors makes it less useful to your own customers, which makes competitors’ offerings even more comparatively attractive.
There are counter-arguments (e.g., about the conditions under which this result holds), but it’s a useful intuition pump.
@cfiesler Posner’s 1974 article is one of the canonical cites: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2853&context=journal_articles
@jtlg thank you!!
Sukrit Venkatagiri@cfiesler wow. What a terrible decision. It's also going to significantly affect conversations on Twitter when you can't say, "Look at what Zuck posted on FB" or DT on Truth Social. Seems like Twitter's demise will be death by a thousand poorly made decisions...
Magess 
@Magess haha same I had to look it up!