CNN New York –
Twitter on Thursday evening banned the accounts of several high-profile journalists from major news organizations without explanation, apparently marking a major attempt by new owner Elon Musk to exercise his unilateral authority over the platform.
The accounts of CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell and other journalists who have aggressively covered Musk in recent weeks were abruptly and permanently suspended. The account by progressive independent journalist Aaron Rupar was also banned.
Neither Musk nor Twitter responded to a request for comment Thursday evening. The platform did not explain precisely why the journalists were exiled from the platform.
The bans raised a number of questions about the future of the platform, which has been called the city’s digital square. It also cast serious doubt on Musk’s alleged commitment to free speech.
Musk has repeatedly said he would like to allow all legal speech on the platform; in April, the same day he announced he would buy Twitter, he had tweeted: “I hope even my worst critics stay on Twitter, because that’s what free speech is all about.”
“Elon says he’s a champion of free speech and that he bans reporters from exercising free speech. I think that calls into question his commitment,” Harwell told CNN on Thursday. Rupar also said he had heard “nothing” on Twitter about the ban.
A CNN spokesperson said the company has asked Twitter for an explanation and would “re-evaluate our relationship based on that response.”
“The impulsive and unjustified suspension of several journalists, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, is troubling but not surprising. Twitter’s growing instability and volatility should be of incredible concern to everyone who uses Twitter,” the spokesperson said .
A New York Times spokesman called the mass bans “questionable and unfortunate,” adding: “Neither The Times nor Ryan has received an explanation as to why this happened. We hope all reporters’ accounts will be reinstated and Twitter give a satisfactory explanation of this action”.
The suspensions come after Twitter also shut down an account of up-and-coming competitor Mastodon on Thursday.
Mastodon’s account had tweeted earlier in the day that people could follow @ElonJet, the account that tracks Musk’s private jet on its platform, after the billionaire banned @ElonJet from Twitter on Wednesday.
This tweet is likely the one that violated Twitter’s rules. In his quest to rid Twitter of @ElonJet, Musk introduced new policies banning accounts that track people’s live locations.
Musk also blocked any account from linking to this information, as Mastodon did by linking to the account on his platform.
The move comes after Musk reinstated previous Twitter rule breakers and stopped enforcing the platform’s policies banning Covid-19 misinformation.
Several of the journalists banned Thursday had covered the Mastodon account ban and highlighted the irony of Musk’s purported mission to advance free speech.
“Freedom of speech is when the second richest man in the world threatens legal action against a 20-year-old college student for sharing publicly available data he doesn’t like,” Harwell tweeted before his account was taken down, in reference to Jack Sweeney, the college student who runs @ElonJet.
CNN’s O’Sullivan had also been covering the story, having interviewed Sweeney and her grandmother about the issue.
“I think this is very important because of the potential impact it can have on freelance journalists, independent journalists around the world, especially those who cover Elon Musk’s other companies, like Tesla and SpaceX,” O’Sullivan told CNN Thursday after his account. was suspended
As the furor over the account suspensions developed, some Twitter users reported that the platform had begun to intervene when they tried to post links to their own profiles on alternative social networks, including Mastodon.
Those reports were confirmed Thursday evening by a CNN reporter who was blocked from sharing Mastodon’s profile URL and received an automated error message saying that Twitter or its partners had identified the site as “potentially harmful”.