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As a subscriber you can listen to articles at work, in the car, or while you work out. Subscribe NowTwitter on Thursday suspended the accounts of journalists who cover the social media platform and its new owner Elon Musk, among them reporters working for The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other publications.
The company hasn’t explained to the journalists why it took down the accounts and made their profiles and past tweets disappear. But Musk took to Twitter on Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts that he described as “basically assassination coordinates.” He provided no evidence for that claim.
The sudden suspension of news reporters followed Musk’s decision Wednesday to permanently ban an account that automatically tracked the flights of his private jet using publicly available data. That also led Twitter to change its rules for all users to prohibit the sharing of another person’s current location without their consent.
Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had been writing about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for imposing it, which involved his allegations about a stalking incident he said affected his family on Tuesday night in Los Angeles.
The official account for Mastodon, a decentralized social network billed as an alternative to Twitter, was also banned. The reason was unclear, though it had tweeted about the jet tracking account.
“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” Musk tweeted Thursday. He later added: “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”
“Doxxing” refers to disclosing online someone’s identity, address, or other personal details.
The Washington Post’s executive editor, Sally Buzbee, called for technology reporter Drew Harwell’s Twitter account to be reinstated immediately. The suspension “directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech,” Buzbee wrote. “Harwell was banished without warning, process or explanation, following the publication of his accurate reporting about Musk.”
CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unjustified suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is concerning but not surprising.”
“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern for everyone who uses Twitter,” CNN’s statement added. “We have asked Twitter for an explanation, and we will reevaluate our relationship based on that response.”
Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of the technology news outlet Mashable, said he was banned Thursday night immediately after sharing a screenshot that O’Sullivan had posted before his own suspension.
The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent earlier Thursday to multiple media outlets, including The Associated Press, about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident, but that no crime report had yet been filed.
“I did not share any location data, as per Twitter’s new terms. Nor did I share any links to ElonJet or other location tracking accounts,” Binder said in an email. “I have been highly critical of Musk but never broke any of Twitter’s listed policies.”
Binder said a message he received while trying to access his Twitter account showed that his suspension was permanent.
But Musk later suggested the penalty would last a week in response to a question about his suspension of former ESPN and MSNBC host Keith Olbermann.
Late Thursday, Musk briefly joined a Twitter Spaces conference chat hosted by journalist Kate Notopoulos of Buzzfeed. He reiterated his claims that the journalists Twitter banned were “doxxing” him when they were reporting on the jet tracking accounts being banned.
“There is not special treatment for journalists,” Musk said, after being asked by the Post’s Drew Harwell if he had a connection between the stalking incident and posting of real-time information.
“You dox, you get suspended, end of story,” he added, before abruptly signing out. The Spaces ended abruptly shortly after 9 p.m. Pacific time.
“Sorry it appears the Space cut out, screen went suddenly blank on my end and everyone got booted,” host Notopoulos tweeted at 9:14 p.m. Pacific.
Another suspended reporter, Steve Herman of Voice of America, said he assumes he was banned “because I was tweeting about other journalists being suspended for tweeting about accounts being booted that had linked to the Elon Jet feed.”
The suspensions come as Musk makes major changes to content moderation on Twitter. He has tried, through the release of selected company documents dubbed as “The Twitter Files,” to claim the platform suppressed right-wing voices under its previous leaders.
He has promised to let free speech reign and has reinstated high-profile accounts that previously broke Twitter’s rules against hateful conduct or harmful misinformation, but also has said he would suppress negativity and hate by depriving some accounts of “freedom of reach.”
The nonprofit Committee to Protect Journalists, which defends journalists around the world, said Thursday night it was concerned about the suspensions.
“If confirmed as retaliation for their work, this would be a serious violation of journalists’ right to report the news without fear of reprisal,” the group said.
European Union Commissioner Vera Jourova, who heads up the 27-nation bloc’s work on values and transparency, also weighed in.
“News about arbitrary suspension of journalists on Twitter is worrying,” she tweeted. Existing EU media rules and new digital regulations taking effect next year require “respect of media freedom and fundamental rights.”
Jourova said, “@elonmusk should be aware of that. There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”
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As some predicted, Musk is totally in over his head. He had no idea what he was in for running a modern social media company, the world changed a ton since his PayPal days.
The previous management might have been awful, but Musk is worse. Little wonder they made him buy them out, it was their best option at getting something out of Twitter. Musk got played.
Tesla shareholders must be elated that the CEO’s Twitter ”problem” has cost them half the value of their stock, as are the Saudi’s who gave him $2 billon. Then again, maybe the Saudi’s have just to help a fellow wannabe autocrat.
As many of us predicted, the media would portray this as journalists “who wrote about owner Elon Musk”, when of course these aren’t journalists anymore. The hyperpartisan activists facing the consequence not just of corrupting their profession but of legally actionable activity. Stalking a child? I guess we shouldn’t be surprised, considering they thought it was okay to do to Barron Trump as well. Granted, the journalistic profession is almost completely corrupted and has no credibility, as manifest by the much-deserved collapse of WaPoo announcing half a million loss in subscribers in the last year.
#45 was completely right about the “press”–they really are the enemy of the people. This would be a terrifying thing to say if the “people” were more violence-prone. But the press actually COVERS violence and criminality when it comes from the little guys; when its the top echelons of power they turn a blind eye…the exact opposite of what the press is supposed to do. It’s no small relief that, as they foment violence among their political enemies, their political allies (belonging to the political wing that is intrinsically more violent) are the ones engaged in most violent activity.
Why did we never get the entire Epstein flight list? Why was there so little coverage of the Ghislaine Maxwell trial? Anyone hear about the murder of Las Vegas reporter Jeff German by a politician Robert Telles? Of course not. It barely made more than local news. Wanna guess what political party Telles belonged to?
Musk is finally restoring integrity to a company that basically enabled an underage sex-trafficking ring. If it collapses from shining a flashlight on all the scurrying cockroaches, the world is still better for it, and I suspect Musk agrees. Hundreds of thousands of tweets mock him every day and face no consequence. The majority of legally actionable tweets (inciting violence, promoting stalking, contributing to the delinquency of minors) happen to come from one political aisle. Of course they’re mad; they’re being held to the standards their company pretended to enforce for years….with (as we’ve learned, to no surprise) full support from the current administration, as well as Uniparty members of the GOP.
What’s the term the normies love to use: “Freedom of speech does not exclude freedom from consequences!” They are correct, just as they were that a private company can largely do what it wants. Within the bounds of the law, of course. Well, since speech does not include “freedom to use speech to share information with the intent of stalking” precisely of the type that would prompt restraining orders, I guess that means Elon Musk is anti First Amendment…eh? Just like parents who don’t want soft-core porn in their public schools (even though these same books remain available at general librires, bookstores, Amazon) are “banning”. Is it anti-1st Amendment to restrict “Deep Throat” from being shown to kindergartners? (Sorry to suggest this; I know I’m giving woke teachers some ideas.)
We keep hearing that there will soon be a leftie equivalent to Gab and Parler, and yet it hasn’t yet happened. They’re addicted to Twitter whose reach is vastly greater even though it was losing $4M a day under Agarwal. Mastodon, where art thou? Most people, left or right, face no threat of suspension on Twitter and the numbers–showing growth in engagement and usership for the first time in years–support this. Even the advertisers, long bulled by the Dem craptivist Mafia, are starting to come back.
It’s little wonder you’re too embarrassed to share the neckbeard sites you get your information.
Also funny how you’re coming to the defense of someone “preventing doxing” when all they’re doing is sharing publicly available information, but you’re more than willing to drop hints that you know where IBJ posters you don’t like work if they embarrass you in a debate, because you wrote down their names years ago while using someone else’s account (your claim).
I know, totally different. Sure it is.
Seems more likely to me that Elon has banned jet tracking because he’s stopping paying his bills and such information would be very useful to the people who want to repo an asset to force them to get paid.
Joe, pumpkin, my “neckbeard” sites are all self-taught journos that you would dismiss without a second’s hesitation because you are in thrall with legacy media. They include an ex-satanist living in Holland, a family man who fled California back to Montana, an edgy ex-professor from New Hampshire, a group of about a dozen Brits living in the far outskirts of London suburbs, a first-generation Iranian from the Bay Area, a metalhead in Arizona, a chunky gamer from Canada well versed in political “science”, and a law school dropout from Romania. They all have YouTube sites, though all have been shot down on occasion for behavior deemed naughty by YouTube, not one time of which includes posting other people’s private information.
If you want trained journos with a more national platform who I think are credible (primarily because they’ve seen how corrupt their profession has become), look no further than Glenn Greenwald, Tim Pool, Bari Weiss, Alison Morrow, Matt Taibbi, or, for that matter, Julian Assange.
Are they “embarrassing”? Probably so, if you think Anthony Fauci IS the science. I think the elf-clown uses science as a shield, and people seeking to fill a religion sized hole in their lives see him as the Second Coming. I prefer the original dude.
Note that you actually hilariously accused me of doxxing you a few months ago, when I haven’t an inkling of a clue where you live and have no interest of knowing.
So, if I had shared where you work with my “following”, since, after knowing your last name it is “publicly available information”, would that have been okay? Of course not. I’m hugely unattractive and have no following, so it wouldn’t have amounted to anything, even if I HAD wanted to doxx you. But I have principles and it would have been ethically wrong, as do most people that I prefer to associate with.
Why is okay for a masked antifa cockroach to drive up to a vehicle with Eland Musk’s toddler son trying to force him off the road? Why would it be okay to use twitter to hone in on a private individual’s vehicle license plate or address. Or, if he’s a billionaire, to track his jet pattern? I didn’t realize that actions that typically result in restraining orders are “free speech”. At least Musk, being richer than Croesus, has a security infrastructure to safeguard him. The random trump voter whose address to a 3BR ranch home gets deliberately shown in CNN footage has no such luxury. In what way is this behavior different than how the white pointy-hatted people intimidated those who challenged the Dixiecrat establishment in the south 60 years ago?
You’ve never once embarrassed me in a debate Joe. I’m surrounded daily by people who think exactly like you; I know how they click since they all share one brain. Why do you all think you’re victims while you use your institutional control to punch down on people who genuinely have less money, less education, and less access to these same corrupted institutions you hide behind? Why is it so hard for you to see how much this resembles 1930s-era Germans’ treatment of Jews of 1960s-era white southerners’ treatment of blacks? You’re not stupid; why are you so blinded by rigid notions of morality that clearly don’t stand up to scrutiny, because no rigid morality is perfect and ALL should be scrutinized?
The truly marginalized people are those with less wealth and less access to institutions that help them build wealth–not people who grew up in bourgeois privilege, who decide they are a 14th new gender and have the legacy media backing them up.
I’m just a better marxist than y’all and I’m not even left-wing. Replacing the class struggle with a racial/ethnic/identitarian struggle has not yielded great results in the 20th century.
Lauren B you rock!
joe B and his ilk are clueless…
Look, drop the idea it has anything to do with Musk’s kid or personal safety. He’s already moved on to ban folks who conveniently compiled a list of of all the times he’s used his following to go after his enemies, like people who write about Tesla in a less than flattering light. It’s his excuse to embrace the autocrat that’s always lived inside him.
If he wants to be angry at someone, how about his security guards? Or maybe he stopped paying them too.
Musk owns the site. He can run it as he wants. He can ban people however he wants, he can modify the algorithm however he wants to make sure visitors first see people posting things about him. He’s welcome to do all that despite claiming he’s all for free speech. And Bari Weiss can call Musk out, tell him he’s full of it and just as bad as previous Twitter management like she did today.
I don’t understand why YOU think you’re a victim or YOU think you’re under attack.
You’re more ponderous than the Christians who go on about how Christianity is under attack in America because they might have to bake a cake for a gay wedding. Meanwhile, Christians in China and India get chased down and killed like dogs for their beliefs.
You have no interest in the less marginalized. You just want the elites replaced with some other elites who hate some of the same people you do… new elites who also have no interest in helping the less marginalized build wealth or get ahead. Bannon or Lake or DeSantis or MTG or Boebert see their supporters as people to fleece, just like Madoff or any number of televangelists did.
Explain to me what they’ve ever done to help people with medical costs or reducing the cost for a college education. Explain to me what they’ve done to reduce the national debt. Heck, explain what concrete suggestions they’ve made for the mental health epidemic in America that leads to crazy people stalking people like Elon Musk.
They’ve no interest in any of that. They’re interested in money and power, and the quickest way for them to get that is to hate the same people you do. They are no different than all the politicians you hate. You’ve been had.
LaurenB.
You’re always in it!!
I’m not oppressed Joe and neither are you. We both have college educations and most likely incomes well above the mediums. The same can be said for sizable numbers of blacks, gays, transgenders, muslims, Pentecostals, and persons with Marfan syndrome.
Trying to bring up Christian persecution in India as a justification for forcing Christians in America is about the sleaziest move you’ve engaged in, and you have tough competition.
Of course Christians shouldn’t be forced to bake a cake celebrating a gay wedding. Nor should Muslims. Nor should liberal businesses be forced to host a Christian gathering, as was a case by a restaurant in Richmond that rejected a group. This is ideologically consistent.
Since I’m so stupid and unable to tell, who are these “elites” represented by Lauren Bobert or Steve Bannon? And if they secretly represent elites, then who ARE the ones representing the working class? AOC, who sided with the neo-libs in crushing a railworkers strike? At least fellow Squad-member Rashida Tlaib took the side of the strikers–a viable stance for someone who claims hard-left bona fides.
The only way you can answer my question that DeSantis and Rand Paul and Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene stand don’t stand for genuine populism (despite being tremendously popular among populist advocates) is the usual: “those working class people don’t know what’s best for themselves.” Which circles us back to the elitism that helped elicit this movement.
College educated people overestimate their own capacity for nuanced thinking–and vastly overestimate their right to participate in the political process. They think they should have more rights than the serfs. All the more hilarious since 2016 was the first election in recorded history where more college educated people voted Dem than GOP. It’s an ongoing trend getting amplified more and more, but even in the 1990s the Dems argued that GOPers were “for the elites”. Many of them are. We call them neocons. But the party in aggregate is less elitist than the modern Dems, which is a testament to how much the Dems have abandoned their “little guy” aspirational representation of yesteryear. And neocons hate the little guy as much as their dear friends the neolibs.
SOMEBODY has to represent these ever-growing filthy peasants, Joe, or a civil war is inevitable. And deserved.
Call a chiropractor after hurting yourself with that reach… a reach no different than the actual details of your case out of Colorado. A web designer who doesn’t even even make wedding websites, much less for gay weddings. And all the law says is that if she sells a template for a website, she has to sell them to everyone. She’s under no legal mandate to do custom work for same sex couples. But, please, make it sound like she’s being forced to watch, no, participate in the play by play of the consummation of the marriage.
“I’m sorry that mob killed your entire family for your faith and you had to escape to America, a totally strange land, for your safety. I know what having your faith attacked is like, my kids and I once saw two gay people hold hands in public and the police told me they couldn’t arrest them.”
No one ever represents the peasants because they always get played by the folks with money. They fall for the distractions tactics – abortion or gay marriage or whatever the new way to split people is – while the elites laugh on their way to the bank. And if an actual peasant manages to survive the trench run and manages to gets elected? Do they ever do something to help the folks who elected them and hurt the elites, like banning political contributions? Of course not. They just make sure they get their cut of the money. It happens every time.
Lauren Boebert traipsing around Florida and nearly losing her election, so focused on hanging with the elites that she forgot she represents Colorado voters? Not surprising at all. She’s really no different than Pelosi or Schumer or Bernie Sanders or McConnell or AOC, for that matter.
So you want to blow it up… so we can have, what, a new system still rigged against the common man with some new elites in charge? What’s the point of that? You’re not going to be one of those elites, those folks like Elon Musk who think they’re above the law. What’s the point of blowing up American democracy when the alternative isn’t going to be any better? Sell me on what’s better.
Change for the sake of change without a stated alternative is about as smart as deciding to jump out of a perfectly adequate plane without a parachute because you don’t like the meal service in first class … and figuring you can sew yourself a parachute out of your clothes on the way down, because how hard can it be?
Kind of like Elon figuring it can’t be that hard to run a social media company … maybe a bad move for a paranoid attention addict.
As a paid subscriber, it is expected that IBJ will be fair and balanced. Not just grab a headline and make it your own. Due diligence research would show the ask by banned journalists for their followers to re-tweet Musk plane locations. Musk son was put in jeopardy by a bad actor because of location info. Please do not promote more hate.
Theo, because Musk flies in public airspace he has no legal right to privacy at 30,000 feet. The Federal Aviation Administration tracks all flights (commercial, military, general aviation, cargo) and makes all such flight information available to the general public inasmuch as the FAA is funded by taxpayers. The only exception is when the interests of national security make such dissemination a risk. While I agree that Twitter (and all other social media platforms) are free to censor platform users as they wish, I find it hypocritical of Musk to proclaim that his platform will be one for all who wish to exercise their freedom to speak…except where his own personal interests are at stake.
Didn’t realize I had written so much earlier this morning (sorry so wordy), but, in contrast with AP’s untruths, there’s nothing remotely “arbitrary” or capricious about these suspensions. They are regulating criminal actions that Twitter previously permitted (apparently with at least some encouragement from the DOJ) as long as it came from one political side.
The Committee to Protect Activists only voices concern about suspension when the “journalism” displays partisanship that they like. Not a credible organization, but then neither is most journalism in 2022.
Lauren, because Musk flies in public airspace he has no legal right to privacy at 30,000 feet. The Federal Aviation Administration tracks all flights (commercial, military, general aviation, cargo) and makes all such flight information available to the general public inasmuch as the FAA is funded by taxpayers. The only exception is when the interests of national security make such dissemination a risk.
Brent, you keep talking, and all I keep hearing is, “It’s okay when we do it.”
Yet, Lauren, you cannot refute me on the facts I present. Pesky things, facts are.
Lauren doesn’t do facts … facts are whatever you believe they are. Hence, in Lauren’s world, unicorns exist just because you say they do.
They say basements should be checked for radon frequently … wonder why …
It’s really actually pretty simple, Brent. It’s about intent.
Using public data with the intent of stalking them is the illegal action. Most people don’t choose to delist their addresses from the archaic “phone book” (or online white pages), and fairly few request Google Street View to blur out their homes. But just because it’s all there doesn’t mean that organizing a mob to intimidate someone is legal.
Using your and Joe’s reasoning, I could camp on the sidewalk that runs along the street to your house with signs saying, “Burn in hell” because the signs are free speech and the sidewalk is a pedestrian easement akin to public ROW. I’m sure you’d be fine with it.
If someone took down your car’s make, model, and license plate numbers so a deranged mob could seek you out and find you on the road, drive up next to you, or surround you on a three-lane highway, would that be legal because it’s public ROW? If not, why is it legal to do an airplane? Given the terroristically minded nature of the people you defend, what’s to stop these people from launching flares that could distract the pilot, or even some sort of ballistic advise to take the plane down?
You and Joe are clearly defending stalking because it’s from the political wing you want to annihilate. Very sad. Even worse coming from Joe, who accused me of the same thing when I never dropped a hint that I know where he lives, and the only reason I know his last name is because he shared it himself on his Disqus account.