On Thursday night, Twitter suspended some high-profile journalists from the platform without warning or explanation.
This situation is determined by the company Suspend Mastodon’s Twitter account, an open-source social media alternative, has gained momentum since Elon Musk took over the company.Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to Mastodon’s page @ElonJet, a student-made robot Track the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.
At least some of the deactivated accounts shared screenshots and observations about Mastodon being deactivated. Just before his suspension, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell tweeted about Mastodon being kicked off the platform.
Former MSNBC anchor Keith Olbermann, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder and reporter Aaron Rupar were also suspended Thursday night. A number of journalists have regularly covered Musk’s acquisition of Twitter in recent months.
Rupar weighs in on his suspension sub stack, observed that while he does not know why his account was deactivated, he did share a link to the ElonJet Facebook account in the process of reporting the topic. Through the alternate account, Mac shared the message he received from Twitter, noting that there was no warning before the permanent deactivation.
Some of the suspended accounts shared Mastodon and ElonJet Twitter handles and images of what appeared to be tweets from formerly suspended accounts.
As Twitter reduces human moderation team, automated systems may enforce Twitter’s new rules for accounts like @ElonJet Overzealous in this situation. But that’s at least likely a case of Musk directing the review process to his liking — we won’t know until someone on Twitter explains what happened.
renew: Musk only weighed in on the suspension, describing it as deliberate. “The same doxxing rules apply to ‘reporters’ and everyone else,” he tweeted back.
TechCrunch has reached out to Twitter’s new head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin, to explain why the accounts didn’t have the opportunity to delete the offending tweets, which is standard practice for many Twitter breaches.Notably, these accounts are in violation of policy prohibiting share “real-time location information”, Only 24 hours.
The story is developing…
