Twitter suspends several journalists' accounts without warning

On Wednesday, the social networking platform modified its policies regarding accounts that tracked private jets

Twitter on Thursday suspended a number of journalist accounts that were reporting Elon Musk and his acquisition of the micro-blogging platform.

Ryan Mac from The New York Times, Drew Hall from The Washington Post, Donie O'Sullivan from CNN, Steve Herman from Voice of America, Matt Binder from Mashable, and Micah Lee from The Intercept are among the journalists whose accounts have been suspended.

Also suspended were the accounts of independent journalists including Aaron Rupar, Tony Webster and Keith Olbermann.

"Twitter suspends accounts that violate the Twitter Rules," reads the notification now showing on the suspended accounts.

A spokesperson for The New York Times described the suspension of journalist accounts as "questionable and unfortunate," expressing their hope that Twitter will provide "a satisfying explanation for this action."

CNN said that the suspension is "impulsive and unjustified" but "not surprising."

It is unclear for how long these suspensions will be in effect.

The move comes a day after the social networking site modified its policies regarding accounts that tracked private jets, including one that Musk owns.

All the journalists who have been suspended seem to have tweeted recently about the shutting down of @Elonjet account on Wednesday.

The account @Elonjet belonged to Jack Sweeney and used publicly available data to track the movement of Musk ' s plane.

The flight-tracking bots that Sweeney built make use of the Federal Aviation Administration ' s ADS-B system to track planes by tail numbers. Anyone with the necessary skills might create a similar bot as the information is openly and freely accessible.

Musk said on Wednesday that a "crazy stalker" had used the information posted by @Elonjet account to locate the car carrying one of his children.

In January, Elon Musk made a $5,000 offer to Sweeney to delete the account that was following his plane.

Last month, the billionaire promised not to remove @Elonjet account from Twitter even though it posed a "direct personal safety risk."

Climate activists frequently use accounts like @ElonJet to highlight the severe environmental impact that private aircraft have.

Kim Kardashian, Taylor Swift and Elon Musk have all faced criticism this year for using private planes when more environmentally friendly alternatives could be used.

After suspending Sweeney's account, Twitter updated its media policy, stating that users cannot publish other people ' s private information without their express permission.

"We've updated our Private Information policy to prohibit sharing someone else's live location in most cases," Twitter's Safety account tweeted.

"Moving forward, we'll remove Tweets that share this information, and accounts dedicated to sharing someone else's live location will be suspended."

On Wednesday, Musk said "any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation."

In another tweet, Musk said that "same doxxing rules apply to 'journalists' as to everyone else."

Musk also conducted a poll asking users when he should lift the ban on journalists who tweeted about "ElonJet."

"Now" was the winner with 43% votes, following by "Longer" with 38.1% votes.

Twitter is also marking links to Mastodon, PixelFed and other alternative micro-blogging platforms as 'unsafe'.