ELON Musk is asking Twitter users to decide if he should stay in charge of the social media platform after acknowledging that he made a mistake on Sunday in launching new speech restrictions that sought to ban mentions of rival social media sites.

In yet another drastic policy change, Twitter had announced that users will no longer be able to link to Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon and other platforms the company described as 'prohibited.'

But the move generated so much immediate criticism, including from past defenders of Twitter's new billionaire owner, that Musk promised not to make any more major policy changes without an online survey of users.

'My apologies. Won't happen again,' Musk tweeted, before launching a new 12-hour poll asking if he should step down as head of Twitter. 'I will abide by the results of this poll.'

The incident was Musk's latest attempt to crack down on certain speech after he shut down a Twitter account last week that was tracking the flights of his private jet.

The banned platforms included mainstream websites such as Facebook and Instagram, and upstart rivals Mastodon, Tribel, Nostr, Post and former president Donald Trump's Truth Social. Twitter gave no explanation for why the blacklist included those seven websites, but not others such as Parler, TikTok or LinkedIn.

Twitter said it would at least temporarily suspend accounts that include the banned websites in their profile. However, the practice is so widespread that it's not clear if — or how — the company would enforce the restrictions on Twitter's millions of users around the world.

One of the test cases was the prominent Silicon Valley venture capitalist Paul Graham, who in the past has praised Musk, but on Sunday told his 1.5 million followers that this was the 'last straw' and to find him on Mastodon. His Twitter account was promptly suspended, and soon after restored.

Twitter had also said it would be banning promotions of third-party social media link aggregators such as Linktree, which some people use to show where they can be found on different websites.

Twitter previously took action to block links to Mastodon after its main Twitter account tweeted about the @ElonJet controversy last week. Mastodon has grown rapidly in recent weeks as an alternative for Twitter users who are unhappy with Musk's overhaul of Twitter since he bought the company for $44 billion in late October and began restoring accounts that ran afoul of the previous Twitter leadership's rules against hateful conduct and other harms.

Some Twitter users have included links to their new Mastodon profile and encouraged followers to find them there. That's now banned on Twitter, as are attempts to bypass restrictions such as by spelling out 'instagram Dot com' and a username instead of a direct website link.

Instagram and Facebook parent company Meta didn't return requests for comment on Sunday. Twitter said it would still allow 'paid advertisement/promotion' from the otherwise banned platforms, as well as 'cross-posting' some content originating from the banned sites.

Musk permanently banned the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, then changed Twitter's rules to prohibit the sharing of another person's current location without their consent. He then took aim at journalists who were writing about the jet-tracking account, which can still be found on other sites including Mastodon, Facebook, Instagram and Truth Social, alleging they were broadcasting 'basically assassination coordinates.'

He used that to justify Twitter's moves last week to suspend the accounts of numerous journalists who cover the social media platform and Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications. Many of those accounts were restored after Musk conducted an online poll.