At least six tech journalists, including New York Times, Washington Post, and CNN writers, had their accounts terminated without warning on Thursday.
Twitter’s new owner, billionaire Elon Musk, is at odds with a user who operated a network of suspended accounts that utilized publicly accessible flight data to monitor the position of private planes, including Musk’s.
Reporters Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, and Drew Harwell of the Washington Post have all been suspended as of what seems to be 4:30 p.m. Pacific Time.
Substack contributor Aaron Rupar was also banned on Thursday and has expressed shock at the decision.
Rupar said on Substack, “I have no clue what regulations I reportedly breached.” No tweets have reached me yet.
According to what Rupar said, “Tweeted late last night that Musk seemed to have broken Twitter’s rules yesterday by sharing a video of himself without the subject’s permission. It’s difficult to see how any of those actions could be a violation of Twitter’s rules.”
Following an update to its privacy policy prohibiting broadcasting or linking to information on a person’s physical location or travel route, Twitter suspended the @ElonJet account on Wednesday, along with others that followed the private jets of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates.
In a tweet sent after he grounded @ElonJet, Musk said “Doxxing someone’s live location is a threat to their physical safety and will result in the immediate suspension of their account. Connecting users with real-time location data online is a necessary part of this.”
Doxxing refers to the act of publishing personally identifiable information about another person online.
Musk announced the policy change the day after one of his children allegedly had a stalking episode in Los Angeles, prompting the family to move. In spite of this, O’Sullivan’s account was terminated when she tweeted a message from the Los Angeles Police Department, which said that officers had spoken with Musk’s security team but that “no criminal reports have been filed yet.”
Musk spoke about the bans on Twitter Spaces with a group of journalists and his longtime collaborator Jason Calacanis late Thursday night, but he abruptly ended the chat when he was asked for further information. Eventually, Twitter disabled Spaces, but by Friday morning, it had been restored.
Without a PR team to reply, Twitter did not immediately provide comment. Musk, though, replied to a tweet about the suspensions with the following one-liner: “Same doxxing laws apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.”
Later, he tweeted that suspensions for doxxing will be in effect for a week.
