Twitter suspended a number of prominent journalists on the platform on Thursday evening without warning or explanation.
The situation followed the company’s decision to suspend the Twitter account of Mastodon, an open source social media alternative that has gained momentum since Elon Musk took over the company. Twitter took action against Mastodon after linking the account to @ElonJet’s Mastodon page, a student-created bot that tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.
At least some of the suspended accounts had shared screenshots and observations about Mastodon’s suspension. Just before his suspension, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell tweeted that Mastodon was kicked off the platform.
Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder and journalist Aaron Rupar were also suspended Thursday night. Many of the reporters have regularly reported on Musk’s takeover of Twitter in recent months.
Rupar weighed up his suspension Substack, noting that while he didn’t know why his account was deactivated, he did share a link to ElonJet’s Facebook account while reporting on the subject. Using an alternate account, Mac shared the message he received from Twitter, noting that there was no warning before the permanent suspension.
Some of the suspended accounts shared Mastodon and ElonJet’s Twitter handles, as well as images of the tweet that appears to have suspended the former account.
In light of Twitter’s reduced human moderation teams, it’s possible that automated systems enforcing Twitter’s brand new rules against accounts like @ElonJet were overzealous in this case. But it’s at least as likely that this is a case of Musk steering the moderation process based on his own preferences – we won’t know until someone on Twitter explains what’s going on.
Update: Musk just weighed in on the suspensions and characterized them as intentional. “The same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as they do to everyone else,” he tweeted in a reply.
businessroundups.org has reached out to Ella Irwin, Twitter’s new head of trust and security, to explain why the accounts weren’t given a chance to remove the offending tweets, which is standard practice for many Twitter violations. It’s worth noting that the policy these accounts violated is a ban sharing “live location information”, is only 24 hours old.
This story develops…
