Elon Musk’s X issues sudden temporary ban of eight journalists

The X/Twitter accounts of at least eight prominent journalists and that of a podcast host were temporarily suspended on Tuesday in what the social media company’s owner Elon Musk suggested was an accident.

All the accounts were restored in a few hours, and at the time of their suspension had at least 75,000 followers. Some of the accounts were also critical of Israel’s war in Gaza, raising concerns of censorship on the platform.

Among the suspended accounts were those of the Texas Observer’s Steven Monacelli, podcaster Rob Rousseau, the Intercept’s Ken Klippenstein, and of the American political podcast TrueAnon.

Journalist Alan MacLeod, the parody account “Liam Nissan”, and Ryan Shead and the anonymous “zei_squirrel” – both known for critical views of Israel – were also temporarily suspended.

Mr Musk posted a tweet hinting that the bans occurred accidentally during a routine sweep for spam and scam accounts.

“We do sweeps for spam/scam accounts and sometimes real accounts get caught up in them,” the Tesla and SpaceX boss said.

X did not immediately respond to The Independent’s request for comment.

X – formerly Twitter – had come under scrutiny by rights groups in the past for the suspension of journalists critical of Mr Musk, who calls himself a free-speech absolutist.

In December 2022, the platform banned the accounts of independent journalist Aaron Rupar, CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable’s Matt Binder, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post and Ryan Mac of The New York Times, all of whom covered Mr Musk in the prior months.

Twitter also banned the account ”ElonJet” which tracked his private jets using publicly available data.

The multibillionaire defended the account bans, accusing the journalists of “doxxing” or publishing private information with malicious intent even though there was no evidence that the reporters had published such content.

“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,” the Tesla titan said.

“Same doxxing rules apply to ‘journalists’ as to everyone else,” he said.

Most of the suspended accounts have since been restored, but some, including the meme account “Juniper” remain permanently banned.

The people behind the accounts suspended on Tuesday have also been highly critical of Mr Musk at times, and some have been vocal about topics like the Israel-Hamas war.

Mr Klippenstein who has over 497,000 followers on X, for instance, reported on the Tesla titan in a story titled “Elon Musk Discussed AI With Israeli Military as It Uses AI to Bomb Gaza.”

But it remains unclear exactly why the accounts temporarily banned on Tuesday were suspended.

“I can’t think of anything I’ve posted lately that would be worthy of suspension. Although I have written multiple critical reports about Twitter/X and Elon Musk in recent months,” Texas Observer’s Steven Monacelli told Gizmodo.

“I haven’t received any communications from Twitter/X about why I have been suspended,” he said.