According to Mitchell Clark and Alex Heath of The Verge, Twitter has suspended the accounts of numerous renowned writers who cover Elon Musk.
According to Clark and Heath, “The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, The Intercept’s Micha Lee, Mashable’s Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, and Tony Webster” are among the reporters.
“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.”
“‘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,’ Irwin said in the email. ‘We don’t make exceptions to this policy for journalists or any other accounts.’”
Twitter terminated the @ElonJet account, as well as the account of its owner, Jack Sweeney, and other accounts he maintained that were tracking the movements of private planes using publicly available data. Today, the crackdown was expanded to include journalists tweeting about the issue.
Twitter also appears to be prohibiting users from posting links to some versions of the competing decentralized social network Mastodon. Specifically, our tests showed that you’ll get an error saying “we can’t complete this request because this link has been identified by Twitter or our partners as being potentially harmful” when trying to tweet links to Mastodon.social, Mastodon.lol, Mastodon.xyz, Mastodon.au, Mastodon.ie, Mastodon.scot, Mastodonapp.uk, Mastodon.world, and others. Mastodon’s Twitter account was suspended earlier today when it posted a link to the ElonJet Mastodon account.
Read more here.
