Hours after Twitter “permanently suspended” more than half a dozen journalists from outlets including CNN, the New York Times, and the Washington Post following their reporting on an account related to Elon Musk, the man himself showed up briefly in a Twitter Space hosted by BuzzFeed News tech reporter Katie Notopoulos on Thursday night.
“Everyone’s going to be treated the same,” said Musk, the CEO of Twitter, in defense of the decision to suspend reporters. “They’re not special just because you’re a journalist.”
Shortly after journalists attempted to further question him about the suspensions, he fled the Space.
Earlier in the evening, Musk had falsely accused journalists of posting his real-time location, which he referred to as “basically assassination coordinates.” He said that doing so was a “direct violation of Twitter terms of service.”
The reporters had been covering the story of Twitter banning @ElonJet, an account that tweeted the whereabouts of Musk’s personal private jet using publicly available data, and then suddenly found their own Twitter accounts suspended. On Thursday, Twitter banned the personal account of Jack Sweeney, the Florida college student who ran @ElonJet, as well as the official account of Mastodon, a Twitter rival that had linked to @ElonJet’s presence on its own platform.
Musk showed up in the Space, titled “#saveryanmac #macpack” (after former BuzzFeed News and current New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, one of the suspended journalists), more than two hours after it started.
