Elon Musk Reinstates Twitter Accounts Of Suspended Journalists – Elon Musk has lifted the suspensions of numerous journalists’ Twitter accounts that he had banned a day earlier, after the results of his second poll on the subject went against his chosen outcome. Musk suspended a number of tech journalists from the platform on Thursday, including Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, for violating the company’s new rule on revealing people’s locations.
Musk said there were too many options after an earlier poll favored an immediate reversal of the bans on Thursday, so he ran another poll for 24 hours with only two options: retain the ban in place for seven days or reverse the ban immediately. After nearly 3.7 million votes, users voted 58.7% to 41.3% to lift the ban. Musk then tweeted that he would lift the bans, and several of those users returned to the platform.
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“The people have spoken,” Musk tweeted. The new rule bars users from publishing “live location information” that would “reveal a person’s location, regardless if this information is publicly available.” Musk claimed the journalists had “doxxed” him, but in fact they had recently published articles about Musk’s suspension of a Twitter account that had shared publicly available data about the movements of his private jet.
Several of the reporters’ articles before their accounts were suspended did not include information about Musk’s current whereabouts or the location of any of his family members. The ElonJet account, which was used to tweet the location of his private jet, was still suspended at the time of publication. The suspension of accounts of reporters covering Musk was strongly criticised by their employers, other media organizations, the EU, and the UN.
Even by Musk’s standards since taking over the platform, it was a chaotic 24 hours on Twitter. Musk briefly entered and was questioned by some of the journalists who had their accounts suspended but were still able to attend the Twitter Spaces event after the suspensions were revealed. He claimed that journalists were not treated any differently than ordinary citizens. “If you doxx, you get suspended. That’s it. End of story.”
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After further questioning from the host, BuzzFeed News tech reporter Katie Notopoulos, Musk left the event, and not long after the Space abruptly ended and was then deleted entirely by Twitter. Then Twitter took the entire Spaces product offline for almost a day, with Musk saying a “legacy bug” needed to be fixed. After it returned, Notopoulos found she had been banned from Spaces. Twitter also targeted its nearest rival, Mastodon, banning linking to several Mastodon servers and blocking users from adding their Mastodon username to their profile.
