Mashable’s Matt Binder is among eight journalists whose suspended accounts have been reinstated after being locked out in what was double the Thursday night massacre (it’s even the name of the Wikipedia article). The suspensions took place on December 15 and the accounts belonged to tech journalists who had criticized site owner Elon Musk.
Musk orchestrated sweeping changes to the site’s doxxing policy Wednesday night in response to an incident with an alleged “crazy stalker“, and he retroactively explained the suspensions as having been the application of the new rule. Binder finds this explanation dubious, but notes that part of owning Twitter is that Musk “don’t need a reason” to suspend accounts he doesn’t like. It’s rich for Musk to call himself “freedom of expression absolutist,” and criticize the former management of Twitter for being too fast with bans when he’s so eager to suspend his detractors – especially after specifically saying he greeted his haters on Twitter.
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The journalists reinstated on Saturday morning are as follows:
The account of competing social media platform Mastodon is also back.
As of this writing Saturday morning, the accounts owned by Matt Binder, along with some of the others, include a placeholder for a tweet with the text “This Tweet violated Twitter rules.” Matt Binder thinks the deleted post may have been a retweet and notes that “they didn’t ask me to delete anything” so it’s unclear exactly what the rule violation apparently was.
Musk had released polls asking if and when the accounts should be reinstated, and the responses overwhelmingly supported reinstatement as soon as possible. Musk got candid about it when the accounts were reinstated and tweeted one of his new catchphrases: “People have spoken.”
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However, one notable exception to the flurry of reinstatements is broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who may have earned further disapproval from Musk by tweeting from a secondary account. Olbermann remains suspended to this day.
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The account of Musk-critical journalist Linette Lopez, who was not part of the initial rollout of the suspensions, is still suspended for the moment.
