- Twitter suspended the accounts of six journalists who wrote about the company and Elon Musk.
- Twitter did not say why the reporters’ accounts were suspended.
- The account tracking Musk’s private jet was shut off Wednesday.
Twitter shut down on Thursday the accounts of more than a half-dozen journalists who had been writing about the company and its new owner, Elon Musk.
Some journalists were tweeting about how Twitter shut down the @ElonJet account, which tracked the flights of the billionaire’s private jet, and how other social networks hosted versions of that account.
Twitter did not say why the accounts of the reporters were taken away.
Sarah Reese Jones of the news commentary website PoliticusUSA tweeted in response to posts about the suspensions, “Nothing says free speech like suspending journalists who cover you.”
Checks on Twitter showed that reporters from CNN, The Washington Post, and other news outlets, as well as independent journalists, had their accounts suspended.
NBC News says that a Mastodon account, which is similar to Twitter, was also shut down.
Musk tweeted on Wednesday that a “crazy stalker” was following a car with one of his children in it in Los Angeles.
He seemed to blame the tracking of his jet for this alleged event. In the tweet, he said that the person who ran ElonJet is being taken to court.
Even though Musk said he is a free speech absolutist, the account that tracked the flights of his private jet was shut down on Wednesday.
The creator, Jack Sweeney, tweeted from his @JxckSweeney account, which was also suspended. “Well, it appears @ElonJet is suspended.”
Later, Twitter told everyone that it had changed its rules so that most tweets couldn’t give away someone’s real-time location.
Musk said in a tweet that any account that shared someone’s real-time location information would be shut down because it was dangerous.
“This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
Doxxing is the act of putting someone’s home address or phone number online, usually to make them a target for abuse.
Under the new policy, people can share their location in tweets that are “not same-day,” and they can also say they are at a public event like a concert.
Sweeney’s Twitter account, @ElonJet, which tracks the movements of Musk’s plane, got a lot of attention. Musk even offered Sweeney $5,000 to shut down @ElonJet, which had hundreds of thousands of followers.
Musk had said in public that after he bought Twitter for $44 billion, he would not touch the account as part of his commitment to free speech on the platform.
Real-time views of air traffic can be seen on websites that track flights and on several Twitter accounts. However, this kind of exposure leads to complaints and the seizure of equipment.
US rules say that planes flying in certain areas must be equipped with ADS-B technology, which sends out signals that can be picked up by simple devices.
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