Twitter manually reviewed every account suspended over ‘Elonjet’ posts, executive says

Twitter’s head of trust and safety says the new privacy policy was applied “equally to journalists and non-journalist accounts”

A top Twitter executive says the company manually reviewed every account that was suspended on Thursday for posting links to an account that tracks Elon Musk’s private jet.

The social media site came under intense criticism for suspending half a dozen journalists from CNN, The Washington Post, The New York Times and elsewhere for supposedly violating its new privacy policy.

Ella Irwin, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, told Reuters that “any and all” accounts to have fallen foul of the new rules had been manually vetted and reporters had not been specifically targeted.

“I understand that the focus seems to be mainly on journalist accounts but we applied the policy equally to journalists and non-journalist accounts today,” Ms Irwin told the news agency.

Mr Musk’s Twitter purge began on Wednesday when he banned the @Elonjet account. That account featured creator Jacob Sweeney using publicly available data to track the billionaire’s private jet’s movements.

Of the ban, Mr Musk later clarified that anyone posting the real-time coordinates would be suspended “as it is a physical safety violation”.

This was apparently a reaction to his son being pursued by an unknown motorist in Los Angeles.

CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan and independent journalist Aaron Rupar later had their accounts abruptly terminated after posting a statement from the Los Angeles Police Department stating that they had not received a formal complaint about the incident.

Elon Musk ran a Twitter poll asking his followers to weigh in on its new policy (Associated Press)

“Criticising me all day long is totally fine, but doxxing my real-time location and endangering my family is not,” Mr Musk tweeted on Thursday night.

In an apparent sign that Mr Musk was creating the new privacy policy on a whim, he later said that “doxxing” would result in a seven day suspension.

He later ran a Twitter poll inviting his followers to weigh in on the new policy.

Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, and Mashable’s Matt Binder, all of whom had covered Mr Musk in recent months, also had their accounts suspended.

On Thursday, Mr Rupar denied he had ever made a post that could have violated the new policy.

“Unless the policy is that you criticize Elon and you get banned,” he told CNN’s Oliver Darcy.