Twitter restores the suspended accounts of several journalists

Elon Musk said early Saturday that Twitter had reinstated the accounts of several journalists whose accounts were suspended after it accused them of violating the social media platform’s rules on personal privacy.

Mr. Musk said he was restoring most of the accounts, which were deactivated on Thursday, after a majority of respondents in his informal Twitter poll voted that suspensions should be lifted immediately.

Thursday evening Twitter Accounts suspended From several high-profile journalists who have written about Mr. Musk’s ownership of the company, including CNN’s Donny O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mack, and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell.

Some journalists wrote about Mr. Musk’s previous comment to the ElonJet account, which has tracked the whereabouts of his private jet using publicly available flight data.

In a heated Twitter podcast with reporters Thursday, Mr. Musk appeared to equate linking to the @ElonJet account in those articles with posting real-time location spam, or “doxxing.” Some of the people whose accounts have been suspended have also written articles critical of Mr. Musk’s oversight on Twitter.

After the suspension, Mr. Musk asked Twitter users when they would reinstate the accounts. Almost 59 percent of the 3.7 million people who voted said users should be reinstated immediately.

Mr. Musk acknowledged these findings in a post shortly after midnight, saying, “People have spoken.”

By the early hours of Saturday, most of the accounts had been reinstated. But the ElonJet account remains suspended, as does that of Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC and ESPN host, and that of Linette Lopez, a Business Insider columnist who has published investigations of Tesla, another company of Mr. Musk.

Johannes Bahrik, a spokesman for the European Commission, said on Saturday that while returning journalists to work was “encouraging,” the commission was concerned about the arbitrary nature of Mr. Musk’s decisions.

“These things need to happen within a framework, not just because someone decides they should be done,” said Mr. Baherki.

He reiterated that if Twitter fails to comply with the Digital Services Act, a set of key EU regulations for digital services that took effect last month, the company could be liable for penalties of up to 6 percent of global annual sales volume, and even a Europe-wide ban.

Vera Jourova, Vice-President of the European Commission, made the same point in A tweet Friday. There are red lines. Sanctions soon.

The UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, welcomed the news of the journalists’ reinstatement on Saturday, adding, however, that “serious concerns remain”.

“Twitter has a responsibility to respect human rights: @elonmusk must commit to making decisions based on publicly available policies that respect rights, including freedom of expression,” he said. on Twitter. “Nothing less.”

The comment alarmed free speech advocates.

Jodi Ginsburg, chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists. He said that if the suspension was a form of retaliation for the work of journalists, “it would be a serious violation of the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal.”

Mr. Musk, who has repeatedly espoused his commitment to free speech, argued that what he did was no different from actions taken by Twitter’s previous owners to restrict certain posts about Covid and presidential politics that the platform deemed misinformation.