Mastodon, a new competing site, and several well-known journalists who were covering Elon Musk, the social network’s billionaire owner, had their accounts suspended by Twitter. The Washington Post, The New York Times, Mashable, and CNN reporters were barred as of late Thursday, and their tweets were no longer viewable.
Mr Musk said the suspended profiles, which included sports and political commentator Keith Olbermann, were of people who had posted his real-time location, describing the information as “basically assassination co-ordinates”.
“I was given no warning. I have no email or communication from the company about the reason for suspension,” Ryan Mac, a reporter with The New York Times, tweeted from a new account.
He posted a screen grab from the app saying he had been permanently suspended.
“I report on Twitter, Elon Musk and his companies. And I will continue to do so.”
The mercurial owner of the service followed up with a poll among his followers as to when he should remove the suspensions. The standard ban period for disclosing personal location information — also known as doxxing — on the service is seven days, he said.
The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, alongside other banned reporters, was able to participate in a Twitter Spaces audio session while under suspension, exposing a loophole in Twitter’s enforcement.
Twitter earlier cut off the feed of competing social network Mastodon, which had posted a link on its Twitter page to an account on its own service that uses publicly available flight data to track Mr Musk’s private jet.
On Wednesday, Twitter suspended several profiles that tracked private jet locations, including Mr Musk’s.
Mr Musk, who has called himself a free-speech absolutist and took over Twitter with the stated goal of eliminating censorship, tweeted that “doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’, as to everyone else.”
“This is management as dark performance art,” said Paul Barrett, deputy director of the NYU Stern Centre for Business and Human Rights.
“The one thing for which we can all thank Mr Musk is that he is demonstrating, day by day, how dangerous [and self-destructive] it is for so much corporate power to be concentrated in the hands of a few Silicon Valley moguls.”
CNN, whose reporter was swept up in the rash of suspensions, responded by saying “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising”.
“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses the platform. We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will re-evaluate our relationship based on that response.”
An email to Twitter seeking comment on the journalists’ suspensions wasn’t immediately returned.
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