The microblogging service Twitter has suspended the accounts of several prominent journalists who write about Elon Musk, including Ryan Mack of The New York Times, Donnie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Misha Lee of The Intercept, Matt Binder of Mashable, by Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.

Restricted journalists recently tweeted about Musk’s attempts to crack down on the location of his private jet. After all, their accounts can’t post, but can still join the Twitter Spaces audio chat. The accounts of Harwell, Binder, and ElonJet gathered here, and Musk tried to explain to them the reasons for the blocking:

“You doxdistributor of personal or confidential information about a person without his consent, you are restricted. End of story, that’s all.”

During the conversation, Musk accused journalists of circumventing the ban. After ElonJet’s Twitter account was blocked, its author created duplicate accounts on Facebook and Mastodon. According to Musk, by posting links to these accounts, the journalists were trying to circumvent the platform’s restrictions.

Musk was reminded of the situation with the distribution of data from Hunter Biden’s laptop, which also contained personal information. Recently, Twitter, with the support of Musk, published details of the consideration of this issue. And the same Musk wrote that the suspension of The New York Post account because of this story “was clearly incredibly inappropriate.”

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Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, pointed to a recent policy update that now prohibits the sharing of real-time location information.

“We do not make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts,” she added.

In addition, Musk conducted a survey asking when he should remove restrictions on journalists who tweeted about ElonJet. In the first version of the survey, the answer option “Now” received the most votes, but Musk relaunched the survey, reducing the number of possible answers. Previously, Musk unblocked Donald Trump’s account and other blocked scandalous accounts, also holding a survey before that.

According to the journalists, they did not receive messages about the reasons for the blocking.

“I haven’t received any messages from Twitter other than a message at the top of my feed that I’m permanently banned and in read-only mode,” wrote one of the blocked journalists, Rupar.

On Substack, he said he posted a tweet yesterday “noting that the ElonJet account that was suspended on Twitter is still active on Facebook, with a link to the Facebook page.”

The New York Times spokesman Charlie Stadtlander also said in a statement that “neither The Times nor Ryan have received any explanation as to why this happened.”

CNN released a statement calling O’Sullivan’s ban “disturbing but not surprising” and said it would “re-evaluate” its relationship with Twitter based on the ban’s explanation.

Recall that Musk previously promised to make Twitter a center for “freedom of speech” and cited the @ElonJet account as an example of what he would allow to be used on the platform, even if it could harm him.

Source: The Verge