Elon Musk’s Twitter account on Thursday triggered a global uproar by dismissing a good number of reporters from significant news outlets who cover him. However, a presumably connected action taken by Twitter at the same point against a quickly expanding rival may subject the business to a regulatory investigation, according to legal experts. The site also blocked the Mastodon official Twitter account after it posted about the ElonJet account, adding to its ban of journalists who’d been following a scandal around the third-party tracking of Musk’s private jet.
Twitter reported Mastodon URLs as potentially dangerous and unsafe, and tweets comprising those links were blocked. Users were also not allowed to add Mastodon links to their accounts. Legal professionals are now debating whether it’s restriction of Mastodon connections may have anticompetitive or other legal repercussions.
Twitter Accounts Linked To Mastadon Falsely Shown Harmful
As word of the journalist’s expulsion spread, numerous Tweeters declared they were switching to Mastodon. However, some attempts to direct people to the substitute site appeared unsuccessful due to the sudden limits the company imposed on link-sharing. Other users, like the editor of the New York Times, Patrick LaForge, noticed that trying to connect Mastodon links to Twitter accounts was resulting in error codes from the company indicating that the links were deemed harmful.
Musk fraudulently asserted that the detained journalists broke the firm’s rules by sharing real-time data about his actual whereabouts. The new operator abruptly left the conversation after one of the restricted reporters disputed Musk’s assertion in a Twitter Spaces event that Elon Musk randomly dropped into on Thursday.
The FTC might try to claim that Twitter behaved unfairly or deceptively if the company misled the public with its remarks about Mastodon links, claiming they were spam or dangerous when the firm knew they were innocuous. Given that the FTC is already closely observing the firm’s actions under Musk, the Mastodon controversy may result in further scrutiny that the business could little afford.
