Twitter disables links to Mastodon servers and suspends Mastodon's account.

 The controversy continues a day after Twitter created a new policy to justify its choice to block an account that tracks Elon Musk's private jet.

Mastodon, an open source rival of Twitter, was reportedly removed from the service on Thursday afternoon. According to archives, just before it was suspended, Mastodon (@joinmastodon) tweeted a link to the jet tracking account on its own service.

Update: Twitter marks many of the links to Mastodon as "possibly dangerous" as of 6:30 PM Pacific Time. In our testing, tweeted URLs to some servers without Mastodon in the domain appeared to still function. Mstdn.social and mastodon.social have been blocked, however links to journa.host and other sites continue to function.

As the Mastodon alternative gained popularity, many Twitter users included a link to their Mastodon profile in their bios. The warning "Warning: this link may be hazardous" is now displayed next to any links to prohibited Mastodon servers.

As of 8 p.m. PT, Twitter has disabled links to more Mastodon servers, including journa.host and SciComm.xyz, that don't have a mention to the service in the domain name.

Jack Sweeney, a University of Florida student, is the owner of the now-banned Twitter account @ElonJet. He also runs a variety of other flight-tracking bots that compile flight data from public sources. Along with many of the bots, including one that provided updates on Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Sweeney's personal account on Twitter was also suspended.

Early in November, Musk had a different opinion about the account, but he has now changed his tune and modified Twitter's platform policies to reflect his own views. Even though there is a clear risk to his personal safety, he tweeted that he would not ban the account that was tracking his jet because he was committed to free expression. Currently, there are community comments explaining the @ElonJet saga that go along with that tweet.

Since the company's hands-on new owner took aboard, Musk's personal and political inclinations have influenced a number of Twitter policy decisions. Musk first said that Twitter would permit any lawful speech, but he has since banned several accounts for private reasons.

Earlier last month, Musk reinstated a number of prominent Nazis and white racists, but he drew the line at Sandy Hook conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, citing his own parenthood.

One person cannot impose restrictions on the entire network on Mastodon, an open source, federated Twitter alternative. Users can leave a server and join another if they disagree with the decisions being made by the administrators of Mastodon's servers, which are independent yet open instances of the social network.