In a recent tweet, Elon Musk said that Twitter rules on doxxing apply to journalists as much as anyone else.
Several prominent journalists on Twitter have had their accounts suspended because they ‘violated the Twitter rules’.
This includes Irish CNN correspondent Donie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster.
The official Twitter account of Mastodon, which many regard as an alternative to Twitter, has also been suspended and links to its servers have been banned.
Earlier this week, Elon Musk – Twitters new owner – suspended more than two dozen accounts that tracked plans of government agencies, billionaires and other individuals in the public realm, according to The New York Times.
The list of accounts suspended includes one by 20-year-old college student Jack Sweeney, who became famous for using publicly available data to track Musk’s travels in his private planes.
While Musk had earlier defended the @ElonJet account and decided against its suspension on grounds of free speech, his latest move marks a sharp U-turn from that commitment.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk tweeted last month.
While Twitter did not give a clear reason for the latest journalist account suspensions, other than for ‘violating’ Twitter rules, The New York Times reports that some of them had either written or tweeted about accounts that tracked private planes.
For many accounts that link to Mastodon servers, the links no longer work and any link to a blocked Mastodon server are accompanied by the “Warning: this link may be unsafe”.
It is not clear what exactly prompted Musk to make the latest changes`, but he said in a recent tweet that rules on ‘doxxing’, or sharing someone else’s personal information, apply to journalists as well as anyone else on the social media platform.
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Elon Musk at the SpaceX headquarters in October 2019. Image: NASA/Aubrey Gemignani via Flickr (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)