By Adedapo Adesanya
New happenings at Twitter, currently owned by the world’s second richest man, Mr Elon Musk, have spurred condemnations from many quarters who have now doubted the foundations of the platform’s policies.
On Thursday, quite a number of prominent journalists who have reported on Mr Musk were suspended or banned from the platform.
In a series of evening tweets, Mr Musk wrote that sharing his real-time location on Twitter was forbidden and accused the journalists sharing information about his location of posting “assassination coordinates”.
Mr Musk said: “Criticizing me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not.”
He added that the “same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else” and wrote: “They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service.”
Accounts of tech journalists at CNN, the Washington Post, Mashable, and the New York Times were suspended. All had recently published articles about Mr Musk’s suspension of a Twitter account that had shared publicly available data about the movements of his private jet. Each of these articles highlighted the tension between Mr Musk’s stated commitment to “free speech” and his choice to ban an account that he personally disliked.
The Twitter account for a rival social media company, Mastodon – which some Twitter users have migrated to after his takeover of Twitter also appeared to have been suspended while links to individual Mastodon accounts also appeared to be banned.
After the development, Mr Musk joined Twitter Spaces, a feature that lets users have live audio conversations on the platform, and he criticised those who not only shared real-time location data of his private jet but those who reported on the story.
Now, the Spaces feature is not working because of a “legacy bug”.
Responding to a user who reported a glitch in Twitter Spaces, Mr Musk said, “We’re fixing a Legacy bug. Should be working tomorrow”.
At the time of writing, it’s not possible to start a new Spaces conversation or join an existing one.
