Several journalists from renowned media outlets, including CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times, and The Independent, as well as accounts belonging to rival Mastodon, have been suspended by Twitter. In accordance with its new privacy regulations, the platform asserts that it is suspending accounts that pose a risk to the safety of others. More details from Twitter are required regarding the circumstances surrounding the suspension of Mastodon’s accounts. This comes after ElonJet, a service that monitored Elon Musk’s private plane activities, was suspended earlier this week.
Musk commented on the suspension, stating that the same doxxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else. He also indicated that Twitter suspended some journalists’ accounts as they posted his “exact real-time location, basically, assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service”.
He did, however, earlier make reference to the suspended ElonJet account and noted that Twitter allows free speech from individuals who are watching his private jet. Twitter revised its privacy guidelines and declared that users are not permitted to share another person’s live location after the account’s owner, Jack Sweeney, started tracking Musk and his friends.
According to Twitter’s statement to The Verge, it has terminated several journalist accounts for breaking its privacy rules and it will not create an exception for them or any other accounts. Mastodon’s account has since been suspended by Twitter, and numerous links to the social media site are now marked as “possibly dangerous.”
Mastodon.social and mstdn.social are two of the forbidden domains. The sharing of “live location information, including information provided on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes” is forbidden, according to Twitter.
For those who don’t know, Mastodon is a decentralized social media platform that isn’t owned by a single organization or person. It consists of a network of autonomous servers. The choice to moderate content is up to each server. According to a source, Sweeney, the owner of ElonJet who is also accused of stalking Musk, now uses Mastodon servers to do business.