Twitter suspended several high-profile journalists Thursday evening who have been covering the company and Elon Musk, NBC News reported. Some messages said the accounts were “permanently suspended,” though Musk indicated the suspensions would last seven days.
According to NBC News, the suspensions come a day after Twitter changed its policies around accounts that track private jets, including the one owned by Elon Musk.
The suspended accounts include: Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept, Steve Herman of Voice of America, and independent journalists Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann and Tony Webster.
The New York Times reported that Twitter suspended more than 25 accounts that tracked the planes of government agencies, billionaires, and high-profile individuals, including that of Mr. Musk. Many of the accounts were operated by Jack Sweeney, a 20-year-old college student and flight tracking enthusiast who had used Twitter to post updates about the location of Mr. Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.
According to The New York Times, Mr. Musk said last month that he would allow the account that tracked his private plane to remain on Twitter, though he said it amounted to a security threat. “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” he said in a tweet at the time.
However, The New York Times reported that Mr. Musk changed his mind this week, after he claimed a car in which one of his sons was traveling was accosted by a “crazy stalker”.
On Wednesday, Mr. Musk tweeted: “Any account doxxing in real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok”.
The Verge reported that the reporters who have been banned all seem to have recently tweeted about Musk’s attempts to crack down on the sharing of the whereabouts of his private jet.
In an email to The Verge, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, pointed to a policy update the company made yesterday prohibiting the sharing of “live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes.”
Irwin continued,”Without commenting on any specific accounts, I can confirm that we will suspend any accounts that violate our privacy policies and put other users at risk. We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.”
The Verge reported that accounts like ElonJet, and the similarly suspended CelebJet and RUOligarchJets are frequently used by climate activists to highlight the egregious effect private jets have on the environment.
Ideally, the this policy could be used to suspend people who have doxxed someone on Twitter, or to suspend large accounts that target people in the hopes that their followers will choose to cause those people harm. It’s difficult to know for certain how the policy will actually be used.