Late Thursday, reporters from publications including the Washington Postthe New York Times, Mashable and CNN were listed as blocked and their tweets no longer visible, with the company’s standard warning saying it “suspends accounts that violate Twitter rules.”
“I have not been given any notice. I have no email or communication from the company as to the reason for the suspension,” New York Times reporter Ryan Mac tweeted from a new account. He posted a screenshot from the app saying it was permanently suspended. “Report it on Twitter, Elon Musk and his companies. And I will continue to do so”.
Sports commentator and politician Keith Olbermann was also affected. Musk said Olbermann will be subject to a 7-day suspension for doxxing. In a separate tweet, he said the suspended reporters had posted his exact location in real time, describing the information as “basically coordinates of the assassination.”
Twitter previously shut down the feed of competitor social network Mastodon, which posted a link on its Twitter page to an account on its own service that uses publicly available flight data to track Musk’s private jet. On Wednesday, Twitter suspended several profiles that track the locations of private jets, including Musk’s.
Mastodon’s website on a smartphone staged in the Brooklyn borough of New York, United States on Monday, November 7, 2022. Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter Inc. is prompting some users to look for alternative platforms, with mixed fortunes.
Musk, who has described himself as a free speech absolutist and has taken over Twitter with the stated goal of eliminating censorship, tweeted that “the rules of doxxing apply to ‘journalists’ just like everyone else.”
“This is management as a dark performance art,” Paul Barrett, deputy director of NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, said in an email. “The one thing we can all thank Musk for is that he is proving, day after day, how dangerous (and self-destructive) it is that so much corporate power is concentrated in the hands of a few Silicon Valley tycoons.”
CNN, whose reporter was swept up in the wave of suspensions, responded by saying “the impulsive and unwarranted suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising. The growing instability “Twitter’s volatility should be of incredible concern to all who use the platform. We have asked Twitter for an explanation and will re-evaluate our relationship based on that response.”
An email to Twitter asking for comment on the journalists’ suspensions was not immediately returned.
