To understand the situation, it is necessary to remember that it all began with another turn of the story about the plane. After removing the @ElonJet page, Musk introduced new rules and said that from now on, posting any person’s real-time location data on Twitter is prohibited. In addition, you may not distribute links to sites containing such information. Musk accuses the blocked journalists of the latter, accusing them of “bypassing the ban.” They’ve all posted links to Mastodon and Facebook pages, where developer Jack Sweeney has set up new accounts to follow the billionaire’s plane, who is no longer the world’s richest man.

Freedom for all except journalists

Twitter suspended the accounts of representatives of the world’s most famous media, including:

• Ryan Mack of The New York Times,
• CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan
• Drew Harvella of The Washington Post,
• Misha Lee of The Intercept
• By Matt Binder of Mashable,
• Aaron Rupar and Tony Webster.

It seems that none of them received any warnings or emails.

I didn’t receive any notifications from Twitter other than a message at the top of my stream saying I was permanently blocked and in read-only mode. I have no idea what could be causing this.
Aaron Rupar, who posted a tweet a day ago with a link to the new ElonJet Facebook page, told The Verge.

A similar statement was made in The New York Times.

A little later Elon Musk created a survey asking subscribers for their opinion on when it would be appropriate to lift the ban on journalists. Options include ‘Now’, ‘Tomorrow’, ‘7 days’ and ‘Longer’. Despite the regret of Musk himself, the majority chose the first option – unlocking right now. But instead of accepting, he restarted the vote, saying there were “too many” options. The new poll will run for one day.

Musk poll old and new / Photo: The Verge

Musk in Space and troubling questions

BuzzFeed News reporter Katie Notopoulos went live on Twitter Spaces to discuss the sudden bans.

When Prostir gained thousands of listeners – peaking at 40,000 – Elon Musk joined them. He tried to explain the reasons for his actions, but things did not go as planned. The truth is that some journalists who were blocked, namely Drew Harwell and Matt Binder, despite being blocked we were able to attend To the Kathy Notopoulos audio stream with @ElonJet. Harvell took the floor and He asked Musk how his decision to ban accounts spreading information about ElonJet differed from Hunter Biden’s laptop situation..

Musk replied to Harwell: “You are using doxing – you will be blocked. That’s all. End of story”. After this response, the entrepreneur quickly left Space.

doxing is the collection and publication of personal or identifying information about a person or organization. Internet search, social network research, checking in public and illegal databases are used to collect data. In this case, Musk talks about the process of tracking his plane with the help of a robot that gets information from a public source.

goodbye mastodon

In an email to The Verge, Twitter’s head of trust and security, Ella Irwin, pointed to a policy update the company made on December 15 that prohibits the sharing of real-time location information and resources that do so outside of Twitter.

I can confirm that without naming a specific account, we will suspend all accounts that violate our privacy policy and put other users at risk. We do not make exceptions to this policy for journalists or other accounts.
Irwin said in an email.

In one of his tweets earlier, Musk actually reported the same thing, calling the tracking of his plane as broadcasting “murder coordinates.”

The same doxing rules apply to “journalists” as to everyone else. They posted my exact location in real time, in fact the coordinates of the murder, which (clearly) is in direct violation of Twitter’s terms of service.– Musk put the word “journalists” in quotation marks, implying that he probably didn’t see them as journalists.

Social network Mastodon, a much less popular competitor to Twitter, has also come under restrictions. The new rules prohibit sending connections to servers:

• mastodon.social,
• mastodon.lol,
• mastodon.xyz,
• mastodon.au,
• mastodon.ie,
• Mastodon.scot,
• mastodonapp.uk,
• Mastodon.world and others.

It turned out that the social network account itself was blocked. He also posted a link to his ElonJet account on his source.