Twitter Bans Journalists Covering Musk And His Company

Drew Harwell of The Washington Post and other prohibited journalists were able to join Musk’s Twitter Spaces audio session while they were suspended. This revealed a flaw in Twitter’s enforcement.

Twitter Inc. has suspended the accounts of numerous well-known journalists who cover Twitter’s billionaire owner Elon Musk as well as the upstart rival service Mastodon.

The Washington Post, the New York Times, Mashable, and CNN reporters’ tweets were no longer viewable as of late Thursday, and the company’s normal message stated that it “suspends accounts that break Twitter rules.”

I received no prior notice. Ryan Mac, a reporter for the New York Times, tweeted from a new account, “I have not received an email or other correspondence from the firm regarding the suspension. He announced his permanent suspension on social media by posting a screenshot of the app. “I write about Elon Musk, Twitter, and his businesses. And I will keep doing it.

Political and sports commentator Keith Olbermann was also impacted. Olbermann will be suspended for seven days, according to Musk, for doxxing. In a different tweet, he claimed the journalists who had been suspended had revealed his precise location in real time, referring to it as “essentially assassination coordinates.”

Drew Harwell of The Washington Post and other prohibited journalists were able to join a Twitter Spaces audio session while they were suspended. This revealed a flaw in Twitter’s enforcement.

Mastodon, a rival social network, had its news feed cut off by Twitter when it provided a link to an account on its own platform. This account uses publicly accessible flight data to track Musk’s private jet. Twitter suspended a number of accounts that tracked the positions of private jets on Wednesday, including Musk’s.

Taking control of Twitter with the declared intention of eradicating censorship, Musk, who has referred to himself as an absolutist of free expression, wrote that “doxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.”

https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1603573725978275841?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1603573725978275841%7Ctwgr%5E805b2abf444674c33755f2a26eec5de9a3f2c06b%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fiframe.nbcnews.com%2FkFtuGsO%3F_showcaption%3Dtrueapp%3D1

Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Center for Business and Human Rights, wrote in an email, “This is management as dark performance art.” Musk is showing, day by day, how risky (and self-destructive) it is for so much corporate power to be concentrated in the hands of a small number of Silicon Valley billionaires, which is the one thing for which we can all applaud him.

The abrupt and unjustifiable suspension of several reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is worrying but not unexpected, according to CNN. CNN’s correspondent was caught up in the wave of suspensions. Everyone who uses Twitter should be extremely concerned about Twitter’s growing instability and volatility. We have contacted Twitter for an explanation, and based on their response, we will reassess our relationship.

Twitter didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment regarding the suspension of the journalists via email.