So Twitter suspended a bunch of journalists tonight. Ryan Mac from the Times, Donie O'Sullivan from CNN, Matt Binder, Aaron Rupar, Keith Olbermann, Drew Harwell from the Post, a couple others. No warning that I saw, no email, accounts just gone when people went to check them. I've had my account since November 2011, same month I started this blog actually, which is a weirdly specific coincidence I only just noticed while typing this.
The official line is that they violated a brand new policy against sharing someone's "live location" without consent. Which traces back to yesterday, when Twitter banned @ElonJet, the account that posted the public flight-tracking data for Musk's private jet. A bunch of the suspended journalists had written about that ban, or linked to the account, or in one case just linked to the guy's personal website where he'd moved the tracking info after getting banned everywhere else. That's it. That's the offense.
I want to be careful here because I don't think every take on this needs to be "the sky is falling," and a lot of people online tonight are being pretty dramatic about it. But also, come on. A policy written and enforced in the same 24 hours, applied retroactively to people who were doing straightforward journalism about a public figure's actions as the new owner of the platform, is not a content moderation decision. It's a guy who got annoyed and pushed a button. Musk himself jumped into a Spaces call earlier tonight to defend it live, which is its own kind of chaotic that I don't think I've ever seen from a company owner before, for better or worse.
The flight tracking stuff is public FAA data, pulled together and posted with a delay. I don't love it either, honestly, I wouldn't want my location broadcast even on a lag, and I get why someone with real security concerns would hate having a plane-shaped bullseye on them. That's a legitimate complaint. But the fix for "I don't like this account" isn't usually "also ban the reporters who wrote three paragraphs about it." Those are different problems and Twitter, or whoever's making these calls now, is treating them like the same one.
What's been interesting to watch is how fast the goalposts moved. A week ago the framing from Musk was "free speech absolutist," and now we're at same-day account bans over doxxing accusations that don't hold up to about five seconds of scrutiny once you actually go check what the banned accounts posted. I went and looked at a few of the tweets myself before writing this, partly because I didn't fully believe the summaries floating around. They're just links to news stories and, in one case, a screenshot of a public Mastodon profile. Not addresses. Not real-time coordinates. Nothing that wasn't already sitting in a public FAA database.
Unrelated complaint while I'm here: my thermostat app updated itself this week and now takes four taps instead of two to just bump the temperature two degrees, because someone decided I needed a "scenes" feature I never asked for. I don't know why so much software in December 2022 seems to be actively getting worse at the one thing it's supposed to do. That's not really about Twitter, I just needed to say it somewhere.
Back on topic. I made a Mastodon account back in late October when all this Musk stuff started, mostly out of curiosity, and I've mostly ignored it since because the people I actually want to read still post on Twitter. Tonight's the first time I've opened the Mastodon app in probably three weeks. It's still rough around the edges, the search is bad and half the servers I tried loading were timing out, but there's something almost calming about being somewhere the owner can't personally decide to disappear a journalist over a linked article. I'm not deleting my Twitter account. I don't think most people reading this are either. But I noticed myself checking Mastodon tonight in a way I hadn't in weeks, and that feels like it means something, even if I can't say exactly what yet.
I don't have a clean ending for this one. It's still happening as I type it, people are still getting locked out, and I'd rather post this now with what I actually saw than wait a few days for it to resolve into something tidier.