Elon Musk’s Twitter blocked links to rival Mastodon. That could raise alarms among regulator

Elon Musk’s Twitter sparked an international outcry on Thursday by suspending a number of journalists at major news organizations who cover him.

But a different and possibly related move that Twitter took around the same time, against a fast-growing rival, could open the company up to regulatory scrutiny, some legal experts say.

In addition to suspending journalists who had been covering a controversy related to the third-party tracking of Musk’s private jet, the platform also suspended the official Twitter account of rival Mastodon after it tweeted about the ElonJet account.

Twitter users began tweeting links to their Mastodon profiles, some half-jokingly telling followers where they could be found on the alternative platform in case they, too, were banned from Twitter without warning.

Soon, however, Twitter began throwing up roadblocks — marking links to Mastodon as “unsafe” and potentially malicious, blocking tweets containing those links and preventing users from adding Mastodon links to their profiles.

Now, legal experts are pondering whether there may be anticompetitive or other regulatory implications arising from Twitter’s blocking of Mastodon links.

“You could see all sorts of problems, both from a competition and a consumer protection standpoint,” said Bill Baer