‘Suspicious and unfortunate’
Among the journalists’ accounts suspended Thursday was Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell (@drewharwell), who wrote on the social media platform Mastodon that he had recently written about Musk and was “publicly available, legally Posted links to “received data”.
Twitter also suspended the official account of Mastodon (@joinmastodon), which has emerged as an alternative to Twitter. Mastodon was not immediately available for comment.
Post executive editor Sally Buzby said Harwell’s suspension undermines Musk’s claims that he intends to steer Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.
Harwell, however, was able to speak on a Twitter Space conversation with fellow reporters late Thursday, a chat that Musk briefly left.
“Docs, you get suspended. End of story,” Musk said on the chat as Harwell dismissed the claim that he had exposed Musk’s real-time location, saying he had simply sent @elonjet posted about.
Twitter on Wednesday updated its policy prohibiting the sharing of “live location information”.
The accounts of Times reporter Ryan Mac (@rmac18), CNN reporter Donny O’Sullivan (@donie), and Mashable reporter Matt Binder @MattBinder were also suspended, as was freelance journalist Aaron Ruper (@atrupar), which covers the US. Policy and Politics.
Mack recently posted several Twitter threads on the @elonjet suspension and interviewed Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old operator of the account.
A New York Times spokesperson described the suspension as “suspicious and unfortunate. Neither the Times nor Ryan has received an explanation as to why this happened. We hope that all journalists’ accounts have been restored and Twitter provides a satisfactory explanation for this action.” ,
CNN said it had asked Twitter for clarification on the suspension and would re-evaluate its relationship with the platform based on that response.
Other journalists could not immediately be reached for comment.