Twitter Bans Accounts Of High-Profile Journalists For 'Doxxing': Report

Twitter accounts of dozens of prominent journalists who were covering the micro-blogging platform's developments in the past few months have been suspended.

Twitter is now leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favouring restrictions on distribution.

Twitter accounts of dozens of prominent journalists from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, Mashable, The Intercept and independent journalists who were covering the micro-blogging platform's developments in the past few months, have been suspended. It was unclear as to why their Twitter accounts were suspended, but each page included a message that read the account was suspended as it “violated the Twitter rules”, the media has reported.

It should be noted that the suspended Twitter accounts include high-profile journalists who have been covering the social media platform and its tech billionaire CEO Elon Musk. The accounts of Times reporter Ryan Mac (@rmac18), Post reporter Drew Harwell (@drewharwell), CNN reporter Donie O'Sullivan (@donie), and Mashable reporter Matt Binder @MattBinder were suspended. The account of independent journalist Aaron Rupar (@atrupar), who covers U.S. policy and politics, was also suspended, says a report by news agency Reuters.

However, Musk indicated that the suspensions stemmed from Twitter's new rules banning private jet trackers, says a report by NBC News. The company started suspending accounts that track private jets, including one that tracks a jet owned by Musk called @ElonJet. 

Twitter's new boss Musk, while replying to a tweet on the suspension of accounts of journalists, tweeted: "Same doxxing rules apply to "journalists" as to everyone else," a reference to Twitter rules banning sharing of personal information, called doxxing.

Musk added: "Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not."

Meltdown!!!! pic.twitter.com/7kBQ6mzEft

— Israel75 (@IFNY2775) December 16, 2022

The Twitter boss also tweeted a poll asking users on the platform to vote on when to reinstate banned accounts that "doxxed his exact location in real-time." Musk redid the poll after it apparently had "too many options" when the option "now" was getting most votes.

Sorry, too many options. Will redo poll.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

Among several changes that Twitter has witnessed since the takeover by Musk, the company is now leaning heavily on automation to moderate content, doing away with certain manual reviews and favouring restrictions on distribution rather than removing certain speech outright, its new head of trust and safety Ella Irwin was recently quoted as saying by Reuters.