Elon Musk Rehires Suspended Journalists, Twitter Poll Cites

Individual reporters from the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, Voice of America and other news outlets saw their accounts go dark Thursday.

Musk tweeted late Friday that the company would lift the suspensions based on the results of a public poll on the site. The poll found that 58.7% of respondents supported a move to unban accounts immediately versus 41.3% who said bans should be unbanned in seven days.

The company did not explain why the accounts were shut down. But Musk took to Twitter Thursday night to accuse journalists of sharing private information about his whereabouts, which he described as “basically murder coordinates.” He provided no evidence for this claim.

Many advertisers abandoned Twitter over content moderation issues after Musk acquired it in October, and he now risks a rift with media organizations that are among the most active on the platform.

Not all journalists rehired

Most accounts were back by early Saturday. One exception was Business Insider’s Linette Lopez, who was also suspended without explanation after the other journalists, she told The Associated Press.

Lopez published a series of articles between 2018 and 2021 highlighting what she called dangerous manufacturing flaws at Tesla.

Shortly before her suspension, she said she posted court-related documents on Twitter that included a 2018 email address from Musk. That address isn’t current, Lopez said, because “he changes his email every few weeks.”

On Tuesday, she posted a story about Tesla issues from 2019 and commented, “Now as then, most of the wounds are self-inflicted by @elonmusk.”

On the same day, she cited reports that Musk waived severance pay for fired Twitter employees, threatened workers who spoke to the media, and refused to pay rent. Lopez described his actions as “classic Elon going-for-broke behavior.”

Voice of America national correspondent Steve Herman told The Associated Press that his suspended Twitter account still hadn’t been fully restored as of Saturday afternoon because he refused to delete three tweets the company allegedly leaked of Musk’s whereabouts. Even though Herman’s Twitter timeline Now visible to most users, he said he couldn’t see it himself or post anything new until he removed the tweets the company claims violated its revised Terms of Service.

“I’m in a new level of purgatory,” Herman said. “I don’t think anything I tweeted violated a reasonable standard of a social media platform.”

Alarm beyond media circles

Concern over the suspensions has reached beyond media circles to the United Nations, which is reconsidering its involvement in Twitter.

The move sets “a dangerous precedent at a time when journalists around the world are facing censorship, physical threats and worse,” UN spokesman Stephane Dujarric said.

The reporters’ suspensions followed Musk’s decision Wednesday to permanently suspend an account that automatically tracked his private jet’s flights using publicly available data. That also prompted Twitter to change its rules for all users to ban sharing someone’s current location without their consent.

Several of the reporters suspended Thursday night had written about the new policy and Musk’s rationale for its introduction, which included his allegations of a stalking incident he said involved his family in Los Angeles on Tuesday night.

The official Twitter account of Mastodon, a decentralized alternative social network to which many Twitter users take refuge, has also been blocked. The reason was unclear, although it tweeted about the jet tracking account. Twitter also began blocking users from posting links to Mastodon accounts, in some cases flagging them as potential malware.

“Of course, that’s a blatant lie,” wrote cybersecurity journalist Brian Krebs.

Musk tweeted, explaining the reporter ban, “The same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else.”

He later added, “Criticizing myself all day is perfectly fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family isn’t.”

“Doxxing” refers to disclosing an individual’s identity, address, phone number, or other personally identifiable information in a manner that could invade their privacy and cause harm.

Washington Post editor-in-chief Sally Buzbee said technology reporter Drew Harwell was “banned without warning, trial or explanation” after accurate reports about Musk were released.

CNN said in a statement that “the impulsive and unwarranted suspension of a number of reporters, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is worrying but not surprising.”

“Twitter’s increasing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern to anyone who uses Twitter,” the statement added.

Another suspended journalist, Matt Binder of technology news outlet Mashable, said he was immediately banned Thursday night after sharing a screenshot O’Sullivan posted before his own suspension.

The screenshot showed a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department sent to multiple outlets, including AP, on Thursday about how it was in touch with Musk’s representatives about the alleged stalking incident.

Binder said he did not share location data or links to the jet tracking account or other location tracking accounts.

“I have been very critical of Musk, but have never violated any of Twitter’s listed policies,” Binder said in an email.

The suspensions come as Musk makes major changes to content moderation on Twitter. He has attempted to claim that the platform has quashed right-wing voices among its former leaders by releasing select company documents, titled “The Twitter Files.”

He has vowed to let freedom of speech reign and reinstated high-profile accounts that previously violated Twitter’s rules against hateful behavior or harmful misinformation. He has also said he would quell negativity and hate by taking the “reach” away from some reports.

“Whim and Prejudice”

Opinion columnist Bari Weiss, who tweeted some of the “Twitter files,” called for the suspended journalists to be reinstated.

“The old regime at Twitter is ruled by its own whims and prejudices and it sure looks like the new regime has the same problem,” she tweeted. “I am against both cases.”

If the suspensions lead to the exodus of media organizations that are very active on Twitter, the platform would be fundamentally transformed, said Lou Paskalis, longtime marketing and media executive and former head of global media at Bank of America.

CBS briefly halted its activity on Twitter in November due to “uncertainty” about new management, but media organizations have largely stayed on the platform.

“We’ve all seen news breaks on Twitter…and now following journalists really cuts through the mainstay of Twitter,” Paskalis said. “Keeping journalists off Twitter is the biggest self-inflicted wound I can imagine.”

The suspensions could be the biggest red flag yet for advertisers, Paskalis said, some of whom had already cut spending on Twitter over uncertainty about the direction Musk will take the platform.

“It’s an open demonstration of what advertisers fear most – retaliation for an action Elon disagrees with,” he added.

On Thursday night, Spaces conference chat was cut short by Twitter shortly after Musk abruptly logged off from a session moderated by a journalist where he had been questioned about the reporters’ ousting. Musk later tweeted that Spaces was taken offline to deal with a “legacy bug”. Spaces returned late Friday.

Advertisers are also watching the potential loss of Twitter users. According to a forecast by Insider Intelligence, Twitter is expected to lose 32 million users over the next two years, citing technical issues and the return of accounts suspended for offensive posts.

Meanwhile, some Twitter alternatives are gaining momentum.

Mastodon had more than 6 million users as of Friday, almost double the 3.4 million on the day Musk took over Twitter. Many of the thousands of confederate networks in the open-source Mastodon platform had administrators and users asking for donations as dissatisfied Twitter users drained computing resources. Many of the networks, known as “instances,” are funded through crowdfunding. The platform is designed to be ad-free.

—Kelvin Chan in London, Frank Jordans in Berlin, Frank Bajak in Boston, and Hillel Italie and Edith Lederer in New York contributed to this report