Twitter banned the accounts of many high-profile journalists from major news organizations without any intimation or explanation on Thursday evening. This action indicates a significant attempt by the new owner to assert his unilateral authority over the platform.
The social media site suspended the accounts of reporters who cover Elon Musk, including Ryan Mac of The New York Times, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Micha Lee of The Intercept, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, and Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, and Tony Webster of Mashable. The reporters who have been barred appear to have recently tweeted about Musk’s efforts to restrict the sharing of his private jet’s location.
The new company head logged into a Twitter Space and ran a poll. He asked when the journalists should be unbanned. Musk falsely claimed that the journalists had violated his new “doxxing” policy by sharing his live location, which amounted to “assassination coordinates,” reports said. However, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN did not reveal the billionaire’s location.
O’Sullivan reported on Twitter shortly before his suspension that the social media company had suspended the account of an emerging competitive social media service, Mastodon, allowing the continued posting of @ElonJet, an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private jet. Other journalists who were suspended had recently written about the account.
Musk accused the journalists of “ban evasion.” After Twitter banned the ElonJet account, its owner created accounts on Facebook and Mastodon. He claimed that by posting links to those accounts, the journalists were attempting to circumvent his ban. Web Fans are watching on both sides.
Harwell from The Washington Post asked Musk how his decision to ban accounts sharing the other ElonJet was different from Twitter’s earlier treatment of a New York Post story about a laptop containing Hunter Biden’s personal information. Twitter made a moderation decision in 2020 to disable links to The New York Post story.
Climate activists frequently use accounts like ElonJet – as well as the similarly suspended CelebJet and RUOligarchJets – to highlight the egregious environmental impact of private jets. Musk has long objected to the real-time sharing of his private jet’s location. At one point, he even offered the manager of the @ElonJet account thousands of dollars to take the account offline.
Twitter suspended the @ElonJet account, as well as the account of its owner, Jack Sweeney, and other accounts he managed that were tracking the locations of private jets using publicly available data. The crackdown was expanded to include journalists tweeting about the situation. Twitter also appears to be prohibiting users from posting links to some instances of the competing decentralized social network Mastodon. The suspensions do not appear to be limited to journalists alone.
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