Twitter reinstates accounts of suspended journalists except Elonjet

--AD--

Through its Safety account, Twitter has declared that it has "found various policies where permanent suspension was an inappropriate response to violating Twitter rules." 

The tweet continued, "The website has already begun reinstating accounts that were suspended for breaking those rules, and it will lift more suspensions every week over the course of the next month." 

The policies Twitter is referring to and the accounts that would be reinstated were not made clear. However, upon investigating, it was discovered that the Mastodon accounts and those of the journalists who had been recently suspended owing to the website's new doxxing policies had been reinstated.

We must go back a few days in order to comprehend what transpired. Over the past week, the website has blocked a number of accounts, beginning with @ElonJet, the account that used publicly available data to follow Elon Musk's private jet's trips. Bans also applied to other accounts that followed the flights of prominent people and government organizations.

Any accounts "doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended," Musk declared on his Twitter. In a subsequent tweet, he claimed that a car carrying his child was being "followed by crazy stalker," and he announced that he was suing @ElonJet's founder Jack Sweeney as well as "organizations who encouraged harm to [his] family." The @ElonJet account is still suspended as of this writing.

When Mastodon tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk's flight on its own platform not long after, Twitter quickly suspended that social network's account as well. It's important to note that days before to this, Twitter appeared to begin classifying postings containing the term "Mastodon" as "sensitive content." In addition, users discovered that they were unable to post URLs to Mastodon servers.

We’ve identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules. We recently started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violations of these policies and plan to expand to more accounts weekly over the next 30 days.

— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 17, 2022

Twitter terminated the accounts of various journalists that write on Elon Musk and the social network itself in addition to Mastodon. According to Musk's responses to inquiries about the event, the most of them mentioned Sweeney or in some way linked to @ElonJet, and the journalists were suspended as a result of Twitter's new doxxing policies. 

The Washington Post's Drew Harwell, one of the writers who had been suspended, published a screenshot of the tweet that the website had designated as a doxxing: It was a story about Mastodon being suspended because it tweeted a link to its own @ElonJet account.

Musk asked people to vote on whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real time "immediately" or "in 7 days" after suspending the journalists. Musk guaranteed that those accounts would be restored after the "now" option was chosen. As of right now, Twitter has restored Harwell's account as well as that of Ryan Mac from The New York Times, Matt Binder from Mashable, Micah Lee from The Intercept, and Donie O'Sullivan from CNN. Even if Twitter hasn't yet lifted the suspension on @ElonJet, Keith Olbermann's account is still down.

--AD--

--AD--