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| Twitter's suspension of journalists' accounts angers the world |
Twitter unprecedented suspension of the accounts of at least five journalists suspected of leaking the real-time location of company owner Elon Musk on Friday sparked a swift response from government officials and news organizations around the world.
Officials in France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the European Union have condemned the suspensions, and some have said the platform threatens freedom of the press.
Critics saw the comment, dubbed the "Thursday Night Massacre," as further evidence that the billionaire self-proclaimed "free speech dictator" is destroying free speech and users he personally hates.
The suspension of the journalist's account follows that of ElonJet, which used publicly available information to track Musk's private jet.
On Thursday, Twitter suspended ElonJet's account with others monitoring private jets, despite Musk promising in an earlier tweet that he would not suspend ElonJet in the name of freedom of speech.
Then Twitter changed its privacy policy to prohibit the sharing of "real-time location information".
Then Thursday night, several reporters, including those who worked for the New York Times, CNN and The Washington Post, were removed from Twitter without warning.
In an email sent to Reuters overnight, Twitter's director of trust and security said the team had manually reviewed "all accounts" that violated the new privacy policy by posting a direct link to an ElonJet account.
"I understand the focus may have been primarily on the accounts of journalists, but today we have implemented this policy to journalists and non-journalists alike," Owen said in an email.
Musk's brief appearance in a Twitter Spaces audio chat hosted by the reporter quickly turned into a debate over whether the already suspended reporter had revealed Musk's real-time location in violation of policy.
“An investigation will get you banned, period,” Musk repeated in response to questions. Note that an investigation means the release of private information about a person, usually with the intent to cause harm.
The Washington Post's Drew Harwell, a suspended reporter who was still able to participate in the voice chat, dismissed claims that he disclosed the location of Musk or his family by posting a link to his ElonJet account.
Soon after, BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos, who was hosting the Spaces chat, tweeted that the audio session had suddenly cut out and the recording was unusable.