Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk suspended a number of journalists and the liberal commentator Keith Olbermann for reporting on an account that was tracking his private flights.
The journalists were suspended Thursday evening after Musk said he would be seeking legal action against the college student who ran the tracking account over an incident where a “crazy stalker” accosted a car with Musk’s son inside.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info,” Musk explained. “Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
Hours later, journalists lost access to their accounts.
Among those
suspended were Donie O’Sullivan of CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, and independent journalist Aaron Rupar.
Musk tweeted about the rationale for the suspensions.
“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” he wrote.
“They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service,” he added in a second tweet.
Some critics of Musk pointed out that the action seemed very arbitrary and that it appeared hypocritical against his statements of commitment to free speech. Prior to acquiring Twitter, he said he would allow the account to continue posting his location information.
“My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane, even though that is a direct personal safety risk,” Musk said in a statement at the time.
Olbermann appeared to be banned for trying to get his follower to post the link that got a journalist banned.
O’Sullivan appeared on CNN and accused Musk of simply suspending accounts that he didn’t like. He also said that before he was suspended, he had reported that the Los Angeles Police Department had no record of the attack on Musk’s child.
Here’s more about the Musk suspensions:
CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan’s Twitter account suspended after reporting Elon Musk’s suspension of userwww.youtube.com