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Carmack was clearly cross-posting, not promoting Facebook. Twitter doesn't generally allow long form posts like that, so it clearly falls under the cross-posting part of the policy.

I don't like this policy either, but let's not make up reasons for it to be bad. There are plenty of real reasons.

The policy says comments like, "follow me @ on Instagram" are explicitly forbidden. One could very easily argue linking to ones own Facebook post could fall afoul.

One could argue that but one would be wrong because cross-posting is clearly allowed if you read the whole policy instead of just the first section.

There's no need to defend Elon here. Clearly what will happen is highly capricious enforcement based on who he personally likes and dislikes.

Don't ascribe motivations to me without evidence. This is not a defense of Elon Musk. I think this policy is stupid. But our criticisms of it should be correct. Otherwise we're no better than our opponents.

There is tons and tons of evidence that Musk is moderating capriciously at this point.

You misunderstand. The person he was ascribing motivations to was me. My intent is not to defend Musk here.

> You should stop ascribing motivations to people without evidence.

I very much agree, however doing that first requires that one is able to perceive reality without making errors, and that is a lot harder than it seems.

As for censorship: all platforms have it, including HN, and opinions (aka: reality) vary on which approach is best.

I think it is pretty clear this is the case, I mean look at any post he has responded to with dislike in the last month -- every day there is a queue of disabled accounts that have interacted with musk or poked his thin skin.

At the end of the day as far as i am concerned its a dead platform -- just the ad reductions against the 1bn + interest means the runway is on fire. Whatever elon does at this point is just pretending to do work effort while juggling balls in the air. It is clear he will not only tank twitter but given he has already hit a sell off cliff on tesla shares he will be licky to have any relevent input on that corp in the near future.

I'm talking about this policy, not Musk. I think the policy is stupid and I think we should argue against it. "Musk won't follow the policy" is not a criticism of the policy. There's plenty of room here to criticize the policy on its own merits.

Honestly I think he was defending the idea of 'read the whole thing' & not Elon.

I do share your prediction that given the ambiguous wording of the cross posting section this will likely involve the feelings of the supreme leader of twitter.

> There's no need to defend Elon here.

There is at least arguably value in defending/pursuing the truth though.

> Clearly what will happen is highly capricious enforcement based on who he personally likes and dislikes.

Visions of the future are sometimes not as accurate as they appear due to shortcomings in the simulator.

> > There's no need to defend Elon here.

> There is at least arguably value in defending/pursuing the truth though.

Indeed, it seems to simply be the case that the company is supporting “paid speech”.

Perhaps, but whether that is actually true is the tricky part....though truth seems to be not very interesting/fun to some cultures, so they instead imagine "truth" into existence and discuss that instead.

If no one breaks character (so far so good in this thread), it works out really good, ignoring the consequences of course.

The policy states "content that contains links of usernames" will be subject to removal.

I think the "cross-posting" that the article is referring to is e.g. downloading a TikTok to reupload it to Twitter, or screenshotting Instagram or whatever. Elon can't risk LibsOfTikTok's entire account falling under violation.

I could be wrong about that interpretation of the policy though, because the wording is probably intentionally vague.

TikTok isn’t on the banned platforms at all, which they claim is because its content is different, but may really be because Elon can’t antagonize China.

Of course this is also banned under EU law. (of course it is, everything is banned under EU law)

One could argue a clear definition of "cross posting" should be provided before assuming it'd be allowed. A policy like this is going to have a chilling effect regardless, due to the ambiguity. It's also a quite absurd for a free-speech platform to even have such a policy in the first place, even if it's attempting to reign in "direct promotion" rather than sharing content across platforms.

> At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL.

The fact that the first explanatory paragraph calls these other platforms "prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms" is confusing at best.

> It's also a quite absurd for a free-speech platform to even have such a policy in the first place

It does make sense for a paid-speech platform, though.

Also, as a thought experiment, if Twitter were a part of the fediverse, wouldn’t this policy essentially be the same as defederating from the prohibited sites?

I’m new to the concept of the fediverse, so I welcome edification or enlightenment on that thought experiment.

No. If your instance defederates from another you can still link to it (though you might get banned if you link to something nasty, depending on your instance's rules). Defederating simply prevents your instance from automatically pulling posts from the other instance, aka the status quo for non-federated platforms.

>It does make sense for a paid-speech platform, though.

What is a "paid-speech platform" exactly? Twitter is just going to be for press releases and advertisers now?

It would also be absurd for a node that claims to implement free-speech absolutism to defederate from any particular node. It would also be absurd to stay federated with nodes that you claim are prohibited while telling people on your node to still cross-post content from these nodes.

> Twitter is just going to be for press releases and advertisers now?

It wasn't already?

I agree with you that the policy should be clearer and I agree there's a chilling effect and I agree that it's absurd. However I disagree that the policy is so unclear that Twitter would be at all likely to interpret it as applying to the specific case of Carmack's post, as OP is arguing. Using fallacious arguments like that weakens your position rather than strengthening it. We can do better.

I don't think it's a fallacious argument when the terms "prohibited sites" & "prohibited platforms" are used instead of "prohibited promotion" & what they deem to be cross-posting is not defined. We could assume best intentions, but given that the policy seems to be from a place of bad intentions, I wouldn't grant the benefit of the doubt.

> the policy seems to be from a place of bad intentions, I wouldn't grant the benefit of the doubt.

The problem with arguing this way is it can't possibly ever convince anyone who doesn't already agree with you. It's a great way to get both sides arguing past each other.

If you're in the right then you can be charitable to the other side and still make your points. That's the only way you'll be heard. Unless all you care about is preaching to the choir. Then go ahead, but I won't join you. It's a good way to farm karma, but a bad way to argue.

Is the policy not from a place of bad intentions? It's clearly a ploy to try to trap users on Twitter, preventing them from promoting their presence on alternative platforms.

Is it not vague and poorly worded in a fashion that could give the impression that sharing links to other platforms might be prohibited? Is this ambiguity perhaps a feature and not a bug?

I find faux-free-speech supporters rely on ambiguity to mask their actual intentions. I would much rather people focus on asking more explicit questions and requesting explicit answers.

It's not a "ploy". Preventing people from promoting their presence on other platforms is the literal stated purpose of the policy. Clearly someone who agrees with the policy would not label that "a place of bad intentions". So if you were to argue with them charitably, you would have to understand why they think it's not bad and convince them that it is bad, not just state it. Of course I agree with you, and I think there are plenty of good arguments to be made! But starting off accusing people of having bad intentions is counterproductive if you want to convince them.

I don't think the policy actually explains its purpose (i.e. why banning these links is necessary), only its application. It discusses the "what", not the "why". This omission is probably also intentional.

I don't think it takes too much brain effort to figure out the problematic nature of the policy given the context of Twitter. If someone cannot, I am not really here to coddle them, or try to convince them otherwise. The only person who can actually answer these questions & clarify the policy is Musk, and I doubt he has any genuine interest in doing so.

There is a whole section on how cross posting is permitted: https://help.twitter.com/en/rules-and-policies/social-platfo...

> What is not a violation of this policy?

> We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above.

> Additionally, we allow paid advertisement/promotion for any of the prohibited social media platforms.

To be clear, I think it's a stupid policy. But it seems like they added this section to expressly address the very concern you are raising.

"Cross-posting" is generally understood to mean posting the same content to different sites, not merely linking to a post.

The policy is...not at all clear. I don't know what they mean by posting content "from" a prohibited site. They don't specifically mention a link.

Honestly I think this is all over thinking it:

> "In general, "

That's all you need to know. Those two words imply "but for -specific cases- there are other criteria".

Looking at the positive side: Now you get to police yourself and/or get to know yourself: will you bend your will to yet another digital tyrant and self-police your self-expression? Will every time you are ready to press that "send" button on a post with links give you pause, thinking "I think, "in general", I am toeing the line, o Supreme Leader, please please let me stay. Monetize me, do with me as you will, but please, just let me tweet!"

We're making a society of digital sheep, "are you in?"

p.s. all these efforts by various tech giants, including those who hold your 'email address' hostage such as Alphabet, are infringing on your digital identity, which they believe they own and control.

And without a durable independent identity, who are you in digital "society"? How could there ever be "democracy" in a "digital society" when people can be erased just like that?

It's like Apple's do not link to you own website with cheaper or direct billing....smh

The cross-posting exception makes it rather trivial to evade the non-promotion policy.

Don't link to othernetwork/@assassinationcoordinates, link to othernetwork/@assassinationcoordinates/post001 and you're good to go.

Do that for all your posts and you've promoted your othernetwork account without violating the policy.

Assuming the policy doesn't change.

I think we all know exactly how this policy is enforced: a regex for banned URLs. If whatever regex they come up with matches the link Carmack posted, it's banned.

If not, it's banned if it personally catches the negative attention of Musk. Arguing over what the policy nominally bans is meaningless.

> There are plenty of real reasons.

Name two.

Reddit already does have a policy like this. Try writing a comment containing "rdrama.net" in it.

> Imagine how absurd it would be for Reddit or Hacker News to have a policy like this.

Some subreddits apparently ban you for linking to personal websites on them. Some forums ban links to other forums. There was a newsletter platform I recall that prevented you from exporting your mailing list (I forget it’s name). Many fiction websites ban you from linking to other sites where you share your fiction

These policies are really lousy, but we can’t pretend they don’t exist elsewhere

> Some subreddits apparently ban you for linking to personal websites on them.

The "no self-promotion" policy originally came from Reddit. Reddit assuaged the wording in 2013 [1] but it's still used by the most popular subreddits as justification to remove whatever they [don't] want.

For example, a pretty cool r/Minecraft Starry Night build [2] was #2 on Reddit when it was removed, perhaps due to Rule #11: Self-promotion must be kept to a minimum. To my knowledge, no explanation for that removal was ever provided.

I discovered this the hard way while building Reveddit. I mention it in the FAQ under Why haven't I heard about this? [3]

[1] https://old.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion?v=64baf14c-da98-11...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/Minecraft/comments/uvpkiz/i_built_s...

[3] https://www.reveddit.com/about/faq/#heard

No, it will not get Carmack banned, because he is not promoting his FB account. He links to a news worthy post.

It is very clearly against the rules as written. They cover “…linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter…”

> What is not a violation of this policy?

> We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above.

This looks like a cross post from John Carmack's Facebook post, which is not in violation.

Reread the what is not prohibited section.

> We recognize that certain social media platforms provide alternative experiences to Twitter, and allow users to post content to Twitter from these platforms. In general, any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above.

I think it would be classified as cross posting a newsworthy event.

Cross-posting can mean posting the same content on two platforms, not linking to content on another platform. Linking to Facebook would likely still earn him a ban.

Yes - that’s what I interpreted it as. From the policy, Cross-posting covers when you “…post content to Twitter from these platforms…” (emphasis mine).

Of course, I suspect the reality is that even people at Twitter don’t know if this falls under the policy or not.

I’m not sure why people here keep talking about the post being ‘newsworthy’ - that is not mentioned in the policy at all.

This is how I understand it, also.

e.g. "You may upload an image to Instagram and also upload that image to Twitter. However, you may not link to that image on Instagram."

The sheer quantity of posts on Twitter suggests to me that they will need to automatically ban folks for linking to some external sites. So I guess the question is would Twitter unban Carmack if they performed a manual review later?

"any type of cross-posting to our platform is not in violation of this policy, even from the prohibited sites listed above" sounds like doublethink.

"Crossposting from prohibited sites is allowed."

I'm going through so much whiplash from the speed of Elon's transition from "it's wrong for Twitter to decide who's public/newsworthy enough for a checkmark" to "we'll allow crossposting if we decide it's a newsworthy piece of content."

I guess we all expected this, but it's just wild how quickly it happened.