Twitter briefly banned links and username mentions related to Facebook, Instagram and other competitors |

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While many people turned to Twitter to follow the World Cup finals on Sunday, the company introduced a new policy banning “free advertising” for competing social media sites. Twitter said it will remove links to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Tribel, Post, Nostr and Donald Trump’s Truth Social from accounts whose “primary purpose” is to promote content on those platforms.

Users were told they could no longer use their Twitter bio to link to their other social media profiles, nor post tweets inviting their followers to follow them elsewhere. In addition, the company has restricted the use of third-party aggregators such as Linktree and Link.bio. Twitter warned that users attempting to circumvent the new policy using technical means such as URL cloaking or less advanced methods would be in violation of the policy.

However, once the Twitter community came to terms with the rule change, their CEO had another change of heart. Within hours of tweets announcing the new policy, as well as the support page outlining the details of its enforcement, were deleted and replaced with a poll ask: “Should we have a policy preventing the creation or use of existing accounts for the primary purpose of promoting other social media platforms?” At the time of writing, the “No” option had an overwhelming share of 86.9 percent of the votes.

Before the deletion, the support page outlined two exceptions to their new rule. “We recognize that certain social media platforms offer alternative experiences to Twitter and allow users to post content from those platforms to Twitter,” the company said. “In general, any form of cross-posting to our platform, even from the prohibited sites listed above, does not violate this policy.” Additionally, Twitter said it will continue to allow paid advertising for all platforms on its new banned list.

Twitter said accounts violating the new policy would be temporarily suspended if it was their first violation or “an isolated incident.” The company may have deleted the offending tweets as well. “Any further offense will result in a permanent suspension,” Twitter added. The company said it is temporarily suspending accounts that add the offending links to their bios. Multiple violations “can result in a permanent suspension,” he added.

Twitter quickly began enforcing the policy shortly after the announcement. At 2:17 p.m. ET, Paul Graham, the founder of startup accelerator Y Combinator and someone who supported Musk’s acquisition, said he was done with Twitter after the rule change and urged his more than 1.5 million followers to tag him on Mastodon to find . Twitter then suspended Graham’s account, only to bring it back a short time later.

The directive comes after another chaotic week on Twitter. On December 15, a handful of notable journalists, including NBC’s Ben Collins and CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan, found they couldn’t access their Twitter accounts. Most accounts had been talking about either Jack Sweeney or his ElonJet account, which was suspended for violating the company’s recently announced policy against public location sharing. While Twitter later restored those reporters’ accounts, on Saturday it abruptly suspended the account of Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz. At the time of her suspension, Lorenz only had three posts to her name, one of which was a tweet to Musk asking him to comment on an upcoming story. Another of her posts linked to her YouTube channel, but at the time, Twitter’s policy against linking to competing platforms didn’t exist, and nowhere in the new rule is Google’s video service mentioned.

Update: 12/19 at 4:02 p.m. ET: Article updated to include reversal of policy change.

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