Elon Musk said early Saturday that Twitter was in the process of restoring the accounts of several journalists whose accounts were suspended after accusing them of violating the social media platform’s rules on personal privacy.
Mr Musk said he was in the process of reinstating most of the accounts, which were deactivated on Thursday after a majority of respondents in his informal Twitter poll voted that the suspensions should be lifted immediately.
On Thursday night, Twitter suspended the accounts of several high-profile journalists who had written about Mr Musk’s ownership of the company, including CNN’s Donie O’Sullivan, The New York Times’ Ryan Mac and The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell.
Some journalists had written about Mr Musk’s previous suspension from an account, @ElonJet, that tracked the whereabouts of his private jet using publicly available flight data.
In a heated Twitter audio session with journalists on Thursday, Mr. Musk equates linking to the @ElonJet account in those articles with publishing intrusive real-time location information, or “doxxing.” Some of the people whose accounts were suspended had also written articles critical of Mr Musk’s stewardship on Twitter.
Following the suspensions, Mr. Musk asked Twitter users when the accounts should be reinstated. About 59 percent of the 3.7 million voters said users should be reinstated immediately.
Mr. Musk acknowledged those results in a message just after midnight, saying: “The people have spoken.”
By the early hours of Saturday, most accounts had been restored. But the @ElonJet account was still suspended, as were the accounts of Keith Olbermann, a former MSNBC and ESPN host, and that of Linette Lopez, a Business Insider columnist who had published investigations into Tesla, another company of Mr Musk.
Johannes Bahrke, a spokesman for the European Commission, said on Saturday that while the journalists’ recovery was “encouraging”, the commission was concerned about the arbitrariness of Mr Musk’s decisions.
“These things have to happen in a context, not just because someone decides they have to happen,” said Mr. Bahrke.
He reiterated that if Twitter failed to comply with the Digital Services Act, a series of key European Union regulations for digital services that came into effect last month, the company could be liable for fines of up to 6 percent of global annual revenue, and even a European ban.
Vera Jourova, a Vice President of the European Commission, made the same point in a tweet on Friday. “There are red lines. And soon sanctions.”
The United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Volker Türk, also welcomed news of the journalists’ recovery 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 suspensions had alarmed free speech advocates.
Jodie Ginsberg, chair of the Committee to Protect Journalists, said if the suspensions were a form of retaliation for the work of the journalists, “this would be a serious violation of the right of journalists to report the news without fear of reprisal .”
Mr. Musk, who has repeatedly advocated his commitment to free speech, argued that what he had done was no different from actions taken by Twitter’s previous owners to limit certain posts about Covid and presidential politics that the platform viewed as misinformation considered.
