Twitter suspends Mastodon after it tweeted about Elon’s jet

Twitter has suspended the official Twitter account of Mastodon, one of the most popular destinations for people seeking a Twitter-like alternative. If you visit @joinmastodon’s profile, you’ll see a message that the account has been suspended.

We don’t know exactly why the account was banned, but it may not have been done entirely out of spite for a rival platform. Instead, it could have been because Mastodon tweeted about @ElonJet.

The Mastodon suspension happened sometime on Thursday. The Wayback Machine has an archive of the active profile from 12:39PM ET, but an archive from 6:12PM ET shows the suspended page. On the archive of the active profile, there’s a tweet pointing to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account.

On Wednesday, Twitter suspended @ElonJet and @ElonJet’s creator and introduced a new policy against sharing live location information. That includes sharing “links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes,” and it appears Twitter counts a link to @ElonJet’s Mastodon account as a violation of the policy.

Twitter, which dissolved its press office during its recent layoffs, didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment. Mastodon also hasn’t replied to a request for comment.