Twitter has stated that it has “found various policies where the permanent suspension was an inappropriate action for breaking Twitter rules” through its Safety account. The tweet stated, “The website has already begun reinstating suspended accounts for breaking those rules, and it will lift more suspensions each week over the coming month.” The policies Twitter is referring to and the accounts that would be reinstated were not made clear. However, following checking, it was discovered that the Mastodon accounts and those of the journalists who had been recently barred from the service due to new rules were once again active.
To understand what happened, we have to go back a few days. The website banned several accounts over the past week, starting with @ElonJet, the account that tracked flights of Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals were banned.
On his account, Musk announcedthat any account “doing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, he said that a car carrying his child was “followed by crazy stalker” and that he was taking legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran @ElonJet, and “organizations who supported harm to [his] family.” As of this writing, the @ElonJet account is still suspended.
We’ve identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules. We recently started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violations of these policies and plan to expand to more accounts weekly over the next 30 days.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 17, 2022
Shortly after that, Twitter also suspended the account of its rival social network Mastodon when it tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk’s jet on its service. It’s worth noting that Twitter seems to have started flagging posts containing the word “Mastodon” as “sensitive content” days before this happened. Users also found themselves unable to post links to Mastodon servers.
In addition to Mastodon, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who report on Elon Musk and the social network itself. Most of them talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way, and based on Musk’s responses to questions about the event, the journalists were suspended due to Twitter’s new doxing rules. One of the banned journalists, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, posted a screenshot of the tweet that the website had flagged for doxxing: It was a report about Mastodon’s suspension for tweeting a link to its service’s @ElonJet account.
Following the journalists’ suspensions, Musk posted a poll asking people whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real-time “now” or “in 7 days.” The “now” option won, and Musk promised that those accounts will be restored. So far, Twitter has reinstated Harwell’s version, along with the accounts of The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, Mashable’s Matt Binder, The Intercept’s Micah Lee, and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan. Keith Olbermann’s performance is still suspended, and it’s unclear if Twitter will lift @ElonJet’s suspension in the coming days.
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