Twitter Just Banned High-profile Journalists Covering Elon Musk Without Warning • TechCrunch

On Thursday evening, Twitter suspended a number of prominent journalists on the platform without warning or explanation.

The position came after the company’s decision Mastodon Twitter account suspended, an open source social media alternative that has built momentum since Elon Musk took over at the company. Twitter took action against Mastodon after the account linked to the Mastodon page ElonJet, a robot made by students Tracks the whereabouts of Musk’s private jet.

At least some of the accounts that have been suspended have shared screenshots and notes about the Mastodon suspension. Right before his comment, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell tweeted about Mastodon being kicked off the platform.

Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, The New York Times’ Ryan Mack, CNN’s Donny O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Bender and journalist Aaron Robar were also suspended Thursday night. Several reporters have regularly covered Musk’s Twitter takeover in recent months.

Robar’s weight in his commentary substack, stating that while he did not know why his account had been deactivated, he had shared a link to ElonJet’s Facebook account while reporting on the matter. Through an alternate account, Mac shared the message he received from Twitter and indicated there was no warning prior to the permanent suspension.

Some of the suspended accounts have shared Twitter handles for Mastodon and ElonJet as well as images of the tweet that appears to have suspended the former account.

In light of Twitter’s human moderation teams, it’s possible that automated systems could enforce this Twitter’s all-new rules against accounts like @ElonJet She was overzealous in this case. But it’s at least possible that this is a case of Musk directing the moderation process based on his own preferences — we won’t know until someone on Twitter explains what’s going on.

Modernization: Musk weighed in on the pendants, calling them intentional. “The same rules of leverage apply to ‘journalists’ as they do to anyone else,” he wrote in a response on Twitter.

TechCrunch reached out to Twitter’s new head of trust and safety Ella Irwin for an explanation of why accounts aren’t given the opportunity to delete offensive tweets, which is standard practice for many Twitter breaches. It is worth noting that the policy that these accounts violated is prohibited share “live location information”, It’s only 24 hours old.

This story develops…