Elon Musk's Twitter blocked links to rival Mastodon. That could raise alarms among regulators

Key Facts

Those questions, which bring to bear on Twitter some of the antitrust scrutiny that’s been leveled at larger tech giants Meta and Google, come just as Twitter faces intensifying questions about its ability to comply with a US government consent decree — along with concerns about hate speech on the platform and the possible precedent set by its suspension of journalists reporting on Musk.
“Twitter is now attempting to prevent its users from navigating to the official social media accounts of elected officials on other platforms,” said Virginia Democratic Rep. Don Beyer, sharing a screenshot of a Twitter system message warning that Beyer’s link to his Mastodon profile was “potentially spammy or unsafe.”
CNN confirmed some of the reports with its own testing, finding that Twitter blocked attempts to tweet links referring users to a Mastodon profile.
If regulators could prove Twitter intentionally used the link blocking to preserve a form of market dominance and to keep a potential rival at bay, then they might have a case, legal experts say.