Twitter apparently revoked its Spaces group audio feature, at least temporarily, after Elon Musk joined a group conversation with journalists banned from the platform.
The latest drama comes after Twitter suspended several prominent journalists who wrote an earlier story about Elon Jet’s Twitter account being banned for using publicly available data to track Elon Musk’s private jet.
As it turns out, Twitter seemingly has a quirk that allows banned users to still join Twitter Spaces and talk to other members, and some of those who were banned did just that. BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos started a group chat last night and was joined by a number of journalists whose accounts were suspended by Twitter, including Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and Mashable’s Matt Binder, as well as Jack Sweeneythe creator of the Elon Jet Twitter account who also had his own personal account suspended.
Elon Musk joined the conversation, where he continued to criticize those who not only shared real-time location data from his private jet, but also those who covered the story. The exchange is available online in several places, including YouTube here:
After being pressured by journalists for some of his inconsistencies, Musk abruptly left the conversation and soon after, the entire Spaces feature started playing itself.
At the time of writing, it’s not possible to start a new Spaces conversation or join an existing one, especially based on the various tests businessroundups.org has run internally. In response to a Twitter user wondering what was going on with Spaces, Musk replied that it “fix an old bug”, and that it should work again tomorrow.
Whether Spaces returns tomorrow or not, Twitter’s recent big proclamations around Twitter 2.0 and his “ongoing commitment to the public conversation” couldn’t be more out of sync with the events of the past 24 hours.
