On Thursday, Twitter banned the accounts of several prominent journalists, who reportedly covered companies’ new boss Elon Musk in recent weeks. These accounts belonged to CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, Matt Binder of Mashable, independent journalists Aaron Rupar, and a few more.
This development comes just a day after Twitter banned @ElonJet, an account that tracked CEO Musk’s jet by monitoring the flight’s path. Allegedly, the accounts were banned for sharing a few links that @ElonJet had posted before it was banned. Earlier, Twitter also suspended more than 25 accounts that tracked the planes of government agencies, billionaires, and high-profile individuals for “violating Twitter rules”.
Following this, Musk said that any account sharing the live location of any person will be suspended. “Real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info,” Musk tweeted.
Musk, who is a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist claimed that the journalists had violated his new “doxxing” policy by sharing his “exact real-time” location or what he described as “assassination coordinates.” In one of his tweets, Musk said, “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.” The Twitter pages of these journalists included a message that said it suspended accounts that “violate the Twitter rules.”
Just a few hours after the suspensions, Musk joined a Twitter Space audio discussion with an audience of more than 30,000 listeners. One of the suspended journalists, along with several others, found a backdoor way onto the platform through the website’s audio function. Before abruptly leaving the discussion, Musk explained and said, “You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That’s it.”
Meanwhile, the micro-blogging platform’s rival Mastodon which is also touted as a Twitter alternative was also suspended on the same day. Several accounts also reported that they were unable to tweet any links to Mastodon pages.
