New York: Twitter has abruptly suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who cover the social media platform and Elon Musk, who acquired the company in October.
The accounts of Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America, and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann as well as Tony Webster had all been suspended as of Thursday evening, CNN reported.
The journalists, however, found a backdoor way onto the platform through the website’s audio function, and hours later of suspension faced off with Musk in a Twitter Space audio discussion before an audience of more than 30,000 listeners.
“You doxx, you get suspended. End of story. That’s it,” Musk said to one of the suspended journalists, explaining his latest policy to the group before he left minutes after having joined the discussion.
Musk was referring to Twitter’s latest rule change about accounts that track private jets, including one owned by Musk himself, which was put in place on Wednesday.
The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as a Twitter alternative, was also suspended early on Thursday evening.
Twitter accounts operated by NBC News journalists were unable to tweet any links to Mastodon pages. Mastodon was, however, trending on Twitter.
According to NBC News, Musk said the suspensions stemmed from the platform’s new rules banning private jet trackers, responding to a tweet from Mike Solana, a vice president of the venture capital firm Founders Fund, who noted that the suspended accounts had posted links to jet trackers on other websites.
“Criticising me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” he said in another tweet.
Doxxing refers to the practice of sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online.
Musk tweeted that the accounts banned on Thursday posted “my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service”.
Musk later added that the suspensions would last seven days.
PTI

Press Trust of India