• Elon Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspension following the results of a public poll on the site.
Elon Musk's sudden suspension of several journalists covering Twitter has widened a growing rift between the social media site and media organizations that have used the platform to build their audiences. Individual reporters at The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other news agencies saw their accounts blacked out on Thursday.
Elon Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspension following the results of a public poll on the site. The survey showed that 58.7% of the respondents supported the move to suspend accounts immediately over 41.3% who said that the suspension should be lifted in seven days.
The company has not said why the accounts were removed. But Musk took to Twitter Thursday night to accuse reporters of sharing private information about his whereabouts, which he described as "basically the coordinates of a murder." He did not provide any evidence for that claim.
Many advertisers quit Twitter over questions of content moderation after Musk's acquisition in October, and he now risks breaking with the media organizations that have been most active on the platform.
Most of the accounts were back in the early hours of Saturday. The one exception was Lynette Lopez of Business Insider, who was suspended after other reporters, also without explanation, she told The Associated Press.
Lopez published a series of articles between 2018 and 2021 in which he exposed dangerous Tesla manufacturing deficiencies.
Shortly before she was suspended, she said she posted court documents to Twitter that included a 2018 Musk email address. That address is not current, Lopez said, because "he changes his email every few weeks."
On Tuesday, she posted a 2019 story about Tesla troubles, commenting, "Now, just like that, most of @elonmusk's wounds are self-inflicted."
That same day, he cited reports that Musk was laying off Twitter employees, threatening employees who spoke to the media, and refusing to pay rent. Lopez described his actions as "classic Alone-going-for-broke behaviour".
Alarm over the suspension extended beyond media circles to the United Nations, which was reconsidering its involvement in Twitter.
"This move sets a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists around the world face censorship, physical threats and worse," said UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric.
The journalists' suspension followed Musk's decision on Wednesday to permanently ban a company that automatically tracked the flights of his private jet using publicly available data. This prompted Twitter to change its rules for all users to prohibit sharing another person's current location without their consent.
Several of the journalists suspended Thursday night were writing about the new policy and Musk's reasoning for implementing it, including his allegations about the stalking incident he said Tuesday night in Los Angeles with his family. influenced.
The official Twitter account for Mastodon, a decentralized alternative social network where many Twitter users are migrating, was also banned. The reason was not clear, though it tweeted about the jet-tracking account. Twitter also began preventing users from posting links to Mastodon accounts, in some cases flagging them as potential malware.
Cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs posted, "This is definitely a bald-faced lie."
Explaining the reporter's ban, Musk tweeted, "The same doxing rules apply to 'reporters' as for everyone else."
He later added: "It's perfectly fine to criticize me all day long, but it's not okay to mock my real-time location and put my family in danger."
"Doxing" means revealing someone's identity, address, phone number or other personal details in a way that violates their privacy and could cause harm.
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