CNN New York –
Twitter on Thursday evening banned the accounts of several high-profile journalists from the nation’s leading news organizations, marking a significant attempt by new owner and free-speech absolutist Elon Musk to exercise his unilateral authority over the platform to censor the press.
The accounts of CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and other journalists who have aggressively covered Musk in recent weeks were abruptly and permanently suspended. The account by progressive independent journalist Aaron Rupar was also banned.
Neither Musk nor Twitter responded to CNN’s request for comment, and the platform did not formally explain why the journalists were exiled from the platform.
But in a series of sporadic tweets, Musk claimed reporters had violated his new “doxxing” policy by sharing his “exact real-time” location, which he described as “murder coordinates.” None of the banned reporters appeared to have shared Musk’s precise location in real time.
Musk later appeared on Twitter Spaces, hosted by a BuzzFeed reporter, and reiterated his claim that he had been doxxed.
Shortly before his suspension, O’Sullivan reported on Twitter that the social media company had suspended the account of an up-and-coming competing social media service, Mastodon, which has allowed the continued posting of @ElonJet, an account that posts the updated location of Musk’s private location. jet
Other journalists suspended Thursday had recently written about the account.
Doxxing refers to the practice of sharing someone’s home address or other personal information online. Instead, the banned account had used publicly available flight data, which remains online and accessible, to track Musk’s jet.
The bans raise a number of questions about the future of the platform, which has been called the city’s digital square. Musk’s censure of journalists cast serious doubt on Musk’s supposed commitment to free speech.r
Musk has repeatedly said he would like to allow all legal speech on the platform. In April, on the same day he announced he would buy Twitter, he had tweeted: “I hope even my worst critics stay on Twitter, because that’s what free speech is all about.”
A CNN spokesperson said the company has asked Twitter for an explanation and would “re-evaluate our relationship based on that response.”
“The impulsive and unjustified suspension of several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is troubling but not surprising. Twitter’s growing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern to everyone who uses Twitter,” the spokesperson said .
A New York Times spokesman called the mass bans “questionable and unfortunate,” adding: “Neither The Times nor Ryan has received an explanation as to why this happened. We hope all reporters’ accounts will be reinstated and Twitter give a satisfactory explanation of this action”.
“Elon says he’s a champion of free speech and he’s banning reporters from exercising free speech,” Harwell told CNN on Thursday. “I think that calls into question their commitment.”
Rupar also said he had heard “nothing” on Twitter about the suspension.
Several organizations condemned Twitter’s decision, with the head of the American Civil Liberties Union saying, “It’s impossible to square Twitter’s free speech aspirations with purging the accounts of critical journalists.”
The president of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) said in a statement that he was “concerned” by the suspensions and that the measure “affects all journalists”.
The @ElonJet account, which had amassed more than 500,000 followers, was permanently suspended on Wednesday after Twitter introduced a set of new policies banning accounts that track people’s live locations. Musk also blocked any account that linked to this information. Previously, there were no restrictions on sharing locations on Twitter.
The changes came after Musk reinstated previous Twitter rule breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies banning Covid-19 misinformation.
“I think this is very important because of the potential impact it can have on freelance journalists, independent journalists around the world, especially those who cover Elon Musk’s other companies, like Tesla and SpaceX,” O’Sullivan told CNN Thursday after his account. was suspended
As the furor over the account suspensions developed, some Twitter users reported that the platform had begun to intervene when they tried to post links to their own profiles on alternative social networks, including Mastodon.
Those reports were confirmed Thursday evening by a CNN reporter who was blocked from sharing Mastodon’s profile URL and received an automated error message saying that Twitter or its partners had identified the site as “potentially harmful”.