Twitter bans numerous journalists, citing the “doxxing” of his jet as the reason
As Elon Musk, the company’s new owner, tweeted that journalists were subject to the same rules against releasing personal information, Twitter on Thursday suspended the accounts of numerous well-known journalists who had lately written about him.
Musk, who has presented himself as an ardent supporter of free speech, tweeted in response to a Tweet about the account suspensions: “Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” making reference to the Twitter policies prohibiting the dissemination of private information, also known as doxxing.
Musk’s statement made reference to Twitter’s banning on Wednesday of the @elonjet account, which used open-source data to track his private jet in real time. Musk vowed to sue the owner of the account, claiming that a “crazy stalker” had been wrongly following his son.
If every journalist whose accounts were suspended had shared or commented on news about @elonjet, that was not known.
Criticizing me all day is absolutely acceptable, but putting my family in danger by leaking my real-time location is not,” Musk wrote in a tweet on Thursday.
Last month, he tweeted that despite the clear risk to his personal safety, he would not ban the account that was tracking his jet as part of his dedication to free expression. Later, he tweeted that doxing would result in a seven-day suspension.
In response, he posted a poll on Twitter on Thursday, asking readers to decide when to restore the accounts of those who had “doxxed” his “precise location in real-time.”
A request for comment from Twitter did not immediately receive a response.
One of the media accounts that was suspended was that of Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (@drewharwell), who posted links to “publicly available, legally acquired data” and claimed to have just written on Musk on the social media network Mastodon.
The suspension of Harwell, according to the executive editor of the Post, calls into question Musk’s assertions that he planned to manage Twitter as a free speech-focused platform.