Twitter on Thursday suspended the accounts of several journalists who write about the technology industry, CNN reported.

The accounts of CNN’s Donnie O’Sullivan, Ryan Mack of the New York Times and Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, along with several other technology journalists, were abruptly suspended.

“Elon says he is a fighter for freedom of speech and blocks journalists for exercising their freedom of speech. I think it calls into question his commitment,” Harwell told CNN.

The account of progressive freelance journalist Aaron Rupar was also banned. Rupar told CNN that he had not received any communication from Twitter about the ban. “Nothing,” he said in a phone call.

CNN has reached out to Musk and Twitter for comment.

The suspension comes after Twitter also suspended an account belonging to Mastodon on Thursday.

Earlier in the day, the Mastodon account tweeted that people could follow @ElonJet, the account that tracks Musk’s private jet on his platform, after the billionaire banned @ElonJet from Twitter on Wednesday.

This tweet probably violated Twitter’s rules. In an effort to get rid of @ElonJet , Musk has introduced new rules that ban accounts that track people’s real-time locations.

Musk also blocked any account from accessing such information, as Mastodon did by logging into an account on his platform.

Several journalists whose accounts were suspended on Thursday wrote about Mastodon’s account bans and pointed out the irony that Musk intended to promote free speech on the platform.

“Freedom of speech is when the second richest man in the world threatens to sue a 20-year-old student for providing public information he doesn’t like,” Harwell tweeted before his account was deleted, with referring to Jack Sweeney, college. student who has @ElonJet.

CNN’s O’Sullivan also wrote about the issue after interviewing Sweeney and his grandmother.

“I think it’s very important because of the potentially chilling effect it could have on independent journalists, on independent journalists around the world, especially those who write about Elon Musk’s other companies like Tesla and SpaceX,” Oh said. Sullivan CNN. on Thursday

(source: news.ro)