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. Eugen Rochko, the founder and CEO of Mastodon, has not publicly addressed Twitter’s link blocking, but has amplified a public report about it. Baer added that Twitter’s link blocking doesn’t just raise potential competition concerns. And prior to Thursday, there did not appear to be grounds for Twitter to claim that Mastodon links were unsafe.

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