“The people have spoken”: Elon Musk offers to unsuspend journalists banned from Twitter under certain conditions

Elon Musk has offered to unsuspend several high-profile journalists on Twitter after he banned them on Thursday, December 15. Journalists whose accounts were suspended included Ryan Mac of the New York Times, Drew Harwell of the Washington Post, and CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan.

However, the prominent journalists were unbanned after a poll supported an immediate reversal of the ban on their accounts. The poll had 2 options, the first was to keep the ban for seven days, and the other was to lift the ban immediately.

Almost 4 million people voted in the poll, wherein approximately 58% of people wanted the ban to be lifted, and the rest 42% people wished that the ban should stay for a whole week.

Sharing the news, Elon Musk tweeted:

“The people have spoken. Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”

However, Musk reinstated that the account came with a condition that barred users from publishing “live location information.” This means that users cannot reveal a person’s location, “regardless if this information is publicly available.”

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The Twitter ban on the journalists came after Elon Musk claimed that they “doxxed” him

Musk claimed that the bans were due to the fact that the journalists posted real-time locations of others. A tweet shared by Elon Musk read:

“They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service”

Many journalists who were banned covered the news about Musk, his management, and policy decisions after he took over Twitter in October 2022. The coverage also talked about a recent controversy, where the social media platform had shut down the account of a user who tracked down Musk’s private jet and leaked the information.

In response to the same, Elon Musk has made rules stricter on the platform and revised the moderation policy. The CEO has now announced that if Twitter finds out any instances where any journalist or users post real-time location data, the case would be treated as a “form of doxxing.” Furthermore, this could lead to a permanent ban or a temporary suspension of the account.

At the same time, the banning of the accounts has been taken in the right light by many people, as Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff also slammed Musk for suspending the accounts.

Elon Musk took the matter into his own hands previously when he had a brief chat with several journalists, who claimed that Musk had been doing the same thing the former Twitter bosses did, which was to suppress news and information.

However, the Tesla owner reportedly ended the meeting by saying:

“If you doxx, you get suspended. That’s it. End of story.”

However, Musk’s decision of banning the reporters was condemned by many employers, media organizations, and even the United Nations.