Elon Musk’s Twitter journalist purge has begun

Twitter has suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists, many of whom have been reporting on Elon Musk’s controversial takeover of the company.

So far, the journalists who have been suspended include Donie O’Sullivan from CNN, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Matt Binder of Mashable, and Micah Lee of The Intercept. The sudden purging seems to contradict Musk’s stated commitment to protecting freedom of speech on Twitter.

“I was very baffled. I thought people were trolling,” said independent journalist and former Vox reporter Aaron Rupar, recounting when he started getting messages from other journalists telling him he’d been suspended. Overnight, Rupar lost access to his 790,000 followers. He said he received no warning before being booted. “You basically have to comply with the whims that change day by day of the owner of the platform, that seems pretty unsustainable. It almost seems kind of spiteful.”

Several of the journalists that have been suspended, including Rupar, had recently posted about the debate over Elonjet — a Twitter account that tracked the whereabouts of Musk’s private aircraft using publicly available flight data. Musk has argued that the account was jeopardizing his physical safety and changed Twitter’s rules to ban the sharing of “live location information” in order to suspend the account. Elonjet’s 20-year-old account owner, Jack Sweeney, argued that the information about Elon Musk’s jets is already public. “If someone wanted to do something, they could do it without me,” he told the New York Times. Some journalists, such as Rupar, had recently tweeted out links to Muskjet’s alternate Facebook account.