Twitter goes on suspension spree, Journalists, rival app - Mastodon affected

A number of prominent journalists on the platform were booted out without any warning or explanation while its rival app, Mastodon has also been suspended. The suspension had started with the ban of an account - @Elonjet, a student-built bot that reveals information about the location of Twitter owner, Elon Musk’s private jet.

The account owner, 20-year-old Jack Sweeney used publicly available flight-tracking information to reveal Mr Musk's take-off and landing time every time he was aboard the plane.

Others that have been banned include some prominent journalists that have been covering news about Elon Musk ever since he declared interest in taking over the bird app.

Some of the suspended journalists include former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, and journalist Aaron Rupar.

Others are The Intercept's Micha Lee and Tony Webster.

According to a report by The Verge, Musk had accused the journalists of sharing links to the banned @Elonjet’s other social media accounts on Twitter. By posting links to those accounts, Musk argued the journalists were trying to circumvent his ban.

The Verge also reports that Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Ella Irwin also confirmed the platform had recently made a policy update prohibiting the sharing of “live location information, including information shared on Twitter directly or links to 3rd-party URL(s) of travel routes”.

In a recent tweet, Musk announced the platform would be taking serious measures against accounts that doxed or revealed details of other users' locations.

In his words “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info. Posting locations someone traveled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok”.

The issue had rather taken a surprising turn soon after as Elon Musk posted a video of a stalker who trailed his son thinking it was him. Musk had vowed he would go ahead and institute legal action against Sweeney and others who support any form of online harassment.

Soon after kicking off the @Elonjet account off Twitter, the platform also suspended Mastodon, its open-source competitor from the service on Thursday afternoon.

The Mastodon account - @joinmastodon had also defaulted on Twitter's doxxing policy by tweeting a link to the jet tracking account on its own service, according to a report by Techcrunch.

Musk recently set up a poll on Twitter to determine if he should unban the defaulting accounts ‘Now’ or in seven days.

As of the time of this report, 59% voted to have the suspension lifted on the defaulting accounts immediately while 41% voted to unban the accounts in seven days.