Twitter has restored the accounts of some blocked journalists and Mastodon
Twitter announced via its “Safety” account that it has “identified several policies, where the suspension was a disproportionate action for breaching the rules. The social network has already begun to reinstate accounts that have been suspended for violating these rules and will lift more bans each week over the next month. It is not specified which rules are in question and which accounts will be restored. But upon checking it turned out that Mastodon account and journalists who were recently blocked due to the new doxing rules are working again.
Over the past week, Twitter has suspended several accounts, starting with @ElonJet, which tracked the flights of Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-ranking officials were also banned.
On his account, Musk announced that any account that “tracks information about the location of anyone in real time will be suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, he said the car carrying his child was “followed by a crazed stalker” and that he was suing Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran the @ElonJet account, and “organizations that supported the harm to [ his] family.”
After suspending the journalists’ accounts, Musk posted a poll asking if he should reinstate user accounts that have specified his exact location in real time, “now” or “in 7 days”. The “now” option won, and Musk promised that these accounts would be restored.
Twitter has now reinstated Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Matt Binder of Mashable, Micah Lee of The Intercept and Donie O’Sullivan of CNN and Keith Olbermann from Countdown. Whether Twitter will lift the suspension of @ElonJet in the coming days remains unclear.