As David pointed out earlier today, Twitter announced a new policy regarding accounts that track the movements of people in real time. This led to the suspension of an account that tracked the movements of Elon’s personal jet. The decision was prompted by a scary incident in which a stranger in a mask jumped on a car transporting Musk’s young son. Musk also threatened legal action against the college student who ran that account.
This evening there are reports that a group of reporters had their accounts suspended. That group included some well known names.
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 and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster had all been suspended as of Thursday evening.
The Twitter account for Mastodon, a platform billed as an alternative, was also suspended early Thursday evening.
It was not immediately clear why the accounts were suspended, though some had been tweeting about the suspension of the Twitter account that tracked Musk’s jet, @ElonJet, and its availability on Mastodon.
Yashar Ali got this screenshot from Rupar who says he has no idea why he was suspended.
Aaron Rupar shared this screenshot with me.
This is what he sees when he logs in. pic.twitter.com/Fep4wM9jb0
— Yashar Ali 🐘 یاشار (@yashar) December 16, 2022
Olbermann has been suspended but this alt account might be him.
There it is pic.twitter.com/nVcv0ZeaYT
— Keith Olbermann’s Dogs (@TomJumboGrumbo) December 16, 2022
So far tonight:
1) active
2) suspended
3) reactivated
4) permanently suspended
5) still no notice by email or explanation from Elon pic.twitter.com/uc1WJCYQFT— Keith Olbermann’s Dogs (@TomJumboGrumbo) December 16, 2022
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So what’s going on here exactly? People have pointed out that what many of these folks seem to have in common is that they cover Twitter and Elon Musk.
The most recent stories by Ryan Mac of NYT, Drew Harwell of WaPo, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, and Matt Binder from Mashable — all banned today from twitter. You don’t need a ton of red string to figure this one out. pic.twitter.com/sWwSMjVQpE
— Abraham Gutman (@abgutman) December 16, 2022
Musk replied to a tweet from Taylor Lorenz a while ago suggesting these bans were related to doxing his location.
Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022
He also said this:
Same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022
So did all of these journalists actually do that? It’s impossible to tell at this point because their accounts are gone. Lord knows I won’t miss Keith Olberman or Matt Binder but they deserve an explanation for what led to this ban. Otherwise it looks like new Twitter is just making things up, no different than the previous version of Twitter. I’d like to see the specific tweet that got each account in trouble. That doesn’t seem too much to ask, especially when the accounts belong to journalists.
Of course it’s true that Twitter is a private company and Elon can do whatever he wants with it, including banning accounts that piss him off. But Musk’s whole rationale for buying Twitter in the first place to preserve free speech. We just went through five parts of the Twitter Files focused on the idea that free speech wasn’t happening at Twitter because the owners were shadowbanning accounts, etc.
I’m not sure what happened here so I’m not going to draw any final conclusions until we know more. But my reaction based on what we know so far is that these accounts probably deserve as much of a 2nd chance as many of the ones Musk brought back a few weeks ago.
Same. Matt Binder can stay gone if it’s for serially inciting harassment mobs, but I agree. Even for Soy Rasputin.
— James Lindsay, making manspreading NFTs (@ConceptualJames) December 16, 2022
