Elon Musk said early Saturday that Twitter is restoring the accounts of several journalists whose accounts were suspended after he accused them of violating the social media platform’s rules on personal privacy. core.
Mr Musk said he was restoring most of the accounts that had been deactivated on Thursday, after a majority of respondents in his informal Twitter survey voted that the suspension should be lifted. quit immediately.
On Thursday night, Twitter suspend accounts of several prominent journalists who have written about Musk’s company ownership, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell.
Several journalists wrote about Mr Musk’s previous suspension of the @ElonJet account, which tracked the location of his private jet using publicly available flight data.
During a lively audio session on Twitter with journalists on Thursday, Mr Musk appeared to equate linking to the @ElonJet account in those articles with the publication of intrusive real-time location information. , aka “doxxing”. Some of those who have their accounts suspended have also written articles criticizing Mr. Musk’s management of Twitter.
After the suspension, Mr Musk asked Twitter users when to reinstate their accounts. About 59% of the 3.7 million people who voted said users should be reinstated immediately.
Mr. Musk acknowledged those results in a post shortly after midnight, saying, “Everyone has spoken.”
By the early hours of Saturday, most accounts had been recovered. But the @ElonJet account remains suspended, as well as that of Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC and ESPN host, and Linette Lopez, a Business Insider columnist who published investigations into Tesla , another of Mr. Musk’s businesses.
Johannes Bahrke, a spokesman for the European Commission, said on Saturday that while the recovery of journalists was “encouraging”, the committee was concerned about the arbitrary nature of Mr Musk’s decisions. .
“These things should happen within the framework, not just because someone decides they should,” Mr. Bahrke said.
He reiterated that if Twitter fails to comply with the Digital Services Act, a key European Union set of regulations for digital services that went into effect last month, the company could face penalties. penalties of up to 6% of global annual sales and even a Europe-wide ban.
Vera Jourova, vice-president of the European Commission, made a similar point in a tweet on Friday. “There are red lines. And sanctions, soon.”
The suspension has alarmed free speech advocates.
Jodie Ginsberg, chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists, speak that if the suspension is a form of retaliation for the work of journalists, “it would seriously violate the right of journalists to report without fear of reprisal.”
Mr Musk, who has repeatedly endorsed the pledge to free speech, argued that what he did was no different from the actions of previous owners of Twitter to restrict some posts about Covid and politics. of the president, which the platform considers disinformation.
