The controversial new Twitter policy restricting advertising on other social media platforms has caught CNN Jim Acosta in the crosshairs, and it was retroactively applied to him, causing his account to be suspended hours before the policy was announced on Sunday.
The new policy, posted by the @TwitterSupport account in a short thread at 12:37 p.m. ET on Sunday, restricted “free advertising for certain social media platforms on Twitter,” specifically citing “Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon , Truth Social, Tribel , Nostr and Post.” Prohibited activities included asking your Twitter followers to follow you on another platform or posting a link to your username in non-Twitter online spaces, including the Typing the link as “dot com” or other shorthand.
The announcement followed a particularly tumultuous week on Chief Twit Elon Musk’s Tenure as Twitter owner, with many Twitter users expressing frustration at his decisions by posting tweets and changing their profiles to promote their accounts on other competing platforms.
CNN Newsroom weekend anchor Acosta was among those who changed his Twitter profile a few days ago, editing his name to show as “Jim Acosta is also on Post and Mastodon.”
Screenshot via Twitter.
He also posted several tweets encouraging his followers to follow him on these other platforms.
“I just signed up for Mastodon. I can’t share my Mastodon account on Twitter. But I can still do it,” he tweeted Friday, along with a shrug emoji and a screenshot of his mastodon profile, as Twitter had started restricting mastodon links as “harmful,” a label previously more common in phishing scams. and scam links was used. A subsequent tweet read, “I think I can do that too,” along with a hand emoji pointing to his username, referring to the other accounts.
The first of these tweets was removed from Twitter and is no longer visible on the platform, just a notice saying “This tweet violated the Twitter Rules”.
Screenshot via Twitter.
The removed tweet can appear in multiple shots in the Archive of Acosta’s Twitter profile at The Wayback Machine as shown in the screenshot below:
Screenshot via The Wayback Machine.
On Sunday, Acosta interviewed the Business Insider reporter Linette Lopez, who has been keeping an extremely critical eye on Musk for years, particularly his leadership at Tesla and SpaceX. Lopez’s latest article, published Sunday morning, taps into “Elon’s stale playbook” to predict that his “bullying” management style will end up “burning” Twitter.
Lopez was one of the journalists whose Twitter accounts were suspended this week, and she has yet to get her account back.
Acosta began the section by mentioning Twitter’s new policy and disclosing how it had directly affected him.
“I should note that my own account was suspended by Twitter overnight,” he said, explaining how one of his tweets was found to have violated the new policy – but hours before Twitter publicly announced the new rule. A source at CNN highlighted how Acosta’s account was retroactively suspended, noting that they had appealed.
“I woke up this morning and my account was suspended,” Acosta continued. “I’m still trying to sort it out. It feels very random and a little hectic.”
“What people really need to understand, what’s happening on Twitter now, is that it’s being guided by Elon’s feelings and not any thoughts about the business model,” Lopez said, noting that the “power users” are the people who Generate content for the platform “for free” and “make the site interesting,” but Musk had those users “right and left” kicked out.
This is “not great for Twitter as a company,” Lopez added, saying that from her experience investigating Musk, this is an example of how he relies on “emotional decision-making.”
“It’s almost like his identity is spreading all over the internet and Twitter,” she said.
Acosta and Lopez also discussed Musk’s recent allegations that journalists had “doxxed” him, and then his own tweets on Sunday showing he was at the World Cup in Qatar.
Musk’s tweet was “kind of an own goal in football terms,” Acosta said to object to people tweeting his location but then posting it.
What the journalists posted “wasn’t his precise, real-time location at all,” Lopez noted. “That’s what Elon feels like. It’s not about rules. Elon is someone who likes law and order as long as he makes the laws and gives the orders.”
“We’re going to see a lot of hypocrisy here and that’s not going to change,” she said, pointing to his history of “bullying people” and “erratic judgments and grandiose promises that will never, ever be fulfilled.”
“There won’t be a moment when Elon becomes a real CEO,” Lopez predicted. “It’s a bit like waiting for Donald Trump to become president. It will never happen.”
Watch the video above via CNN.
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