Elon Musk has reactivated numerous journalists’ Twitter accounts, which had been suspended for a day due to a controversy over the publication of public data regarding the billionaire’s plane.
The reinstatements occurred after the extraordinary suspensions drew harsh criticism on Friday from government officials, advocacy groups, and journalism organizations throughout the world, with some claiming the microblogging platform was harming press freedom.
Musk later held a Twitter poll, which revealed that the majority of responders wanted the accounts restored quickly.
“The populace has spoken. “Accounts that doxxed my location will be unblocked now,” Musk stated in a tweet on Saturday.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Reuters. According to Reuters, the suspended accounts, which included journalists from the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, have since been restored.
French, German, British, and European Union officials had already criticised the suspensions.
The incident, dubbed the “Thursday Night Massacre” by one well-known security researcher, is being viewed as new evidence of Musk, who considers himself a “free speech absolutist,” removing speech and people he personally hates.
Tesla shares fell 4.7 percent on Friday, posting their worst weekly drop since March 2020, as investors were increasingly concerned about Musk’s distraction and the deteriorating global economy.
The French minister of industry, Roland Lescure, tweeted on Friday that, in response to Musk’s suspension of journalists, he would suspend his own Twitter activity.
The United Nations’ head of communications, Melissa Fleming, tweeted that the suspensions were “very disturbing” and that “media freedom is not a toy.”
The German Foreign Office cautioned Twitter that acts that risked journalistic freedom were unacceptable.
ELONJET
The suspensions were the result of a quarrel over a Twitter account named ElonJet, which used publicly available information to monitor Musk’s private plane.
Despite Musk’s prior post claiming he would not suspend ElonJet in the name of free expression, Twitter suspended the account and others that tracked private jets on Wednesday.
Twitter’s privacy policy was soon updated to ban the transmission of “live location information.”
Then, on Thursday evening, several journalists, including those from the New York Times, CNN, and the Washington Post, were abruptly suspended from Twitter.
Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, said in an email to Reuters overnight that the team personally evaluated “any and all accounts” that violated the new privacy rules by tweeting direct links to the ElonJet account.
“I appreciate that the emphasis appears to be mostly on journalistic reports, but we applied the policy equally to journalistic and non-journalistic accounts today,” Irwin wrote in an email.
According to the Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing, Twitter’s actions “violate the spirit of the First Amendment and the principle that social media platforms will allow the unfiltered distribution of information that is already in the public square,” according to a statement issued on Friday.
Musk accused journalists of publishing his current position, which he described as “essentially assassination coordinates” for his family.
The billionaire momentarily appeared in a Twitter Spaces audio conversation held by journalists, which swiftly devolved into a heated debate over whether the suspended journalists had actually divulged Musk’s real-time position in violation of the protocol.
“You are suspended if you dox. “End of story,” Musk responded repeatedly to queries. “Doxing” is the practice of revealing private information about another person, usually with malevolent intent.
Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, one of the journalists suspended but able to participate in the audio chat, pushed back against the suggestion that he had identified Musk or his family’s exact location by sharing a link to ElonJet.
Soon after, BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos, who hosted the Spaces discussion, tweeted that the audio session had been abruptly shut off and that the recording was no longer available.
Musk explained what happened in a tweet, saying, “We’re resolving a Legacy problem. “I should be at work tomorrow.”
Source: Reuters
