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Twitter has announced through its Safety account that it has “identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules.” The website has already started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violating those rules, the tweet continued, and it will lift more suspensions every week over the next month. Twitter didn’t specify the policies it’s talking about and which accounts will be reinstated. But upon checking, the accounts of Mastodon and the journalists recently banned due to the website’s new doxxing rules are up and running again. 

To understand what happened, we have to go back a few days. The website banned several accounts over the past week, starting with @ElonJet, the account that tracked flights of Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals were banned, as well. 

On his account, Musk announced that any account “doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, he said that a car carrying his child was “followed by crazy stalker” and that he was taking legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran @ElonJet, and “organizations who supported harm to [his] family.” As of this writing, the @ElonJet account is still suspended. 

Shortly after that, Twitter also suspended the account of its rival social network Mastodon when it tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk’s jet on its own service. It’s worth noting that Twitter seems to have started flagging posts containing the word “Mastodon” as “sensitive content” days before this happened. Users also found themselves unable to post links to Mastodon servers.

In addition to Mastodon, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who report on Elon Musk and the social network itself. Most of them talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way, and based on Musk’s responses to questions about the event, the journalists were suspended due to Twitter’s new doxxing rules. One of the banned journalists, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, posted a screenshot of the tweet that the website had flagged for doxxing: It was a report about Mastodon’s suspension for tweeting a link to it service’s own @ElonJet account.

Following the journalists’ suspensions, Musk posted a poll asking people whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real time “now” or “in 7 days.” The “now” option won, and Musk promised that those accounts will be restored. So far, Twitter has reinstated Harwell’s account, along with the accounts of The New York Times’Ryan Mac, Mashable’sMatt Binder, The Intercept’sMicah Lee and CNN’sDonie O’Sullivan. Keith Olbermann’s account is still suspended, and it’s unclear if Twitter will lift @ElonJet’s suspension in the coming days. 

Several journalists across various publications have found themselves unable to access their Twitter accounts tonight. They’ve been suspended on the website, and according to NBC News Senior Reporter Ben Collins, one thing they had in common was that they covered the social network and Elon Musk, who once described himself as a “free speech absolutist.” Collins listed the suspended journalists’ accounts on a Twitter thread, including CNN’sDonie O’Sullivan whose last tweets included his interview with Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran the @ElonJet account. 

The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell lost his account following a tweet about how Twitter suspended Mastodon, its rival social network that’s been gaining popularity since Musk took over, after it posted a link to the account that tracked Musk’s private jet. The New York Times’Ryan Mac lost access to his account after talking about Sweeney and Twitter’s policy changes following @ElonJet’s suspension. Mashable’sMatt Binder also found himself suspended after retweeting a post doubting Musk’s claim that he and his son were followed by a “crazy stalker” and another about how Twitter’s new head of trust and safety invited a QAnon-adjacent group to discuss a partnership. 

Next in the list is Micah Flee from The Intercept who recently tweeted: “So much more arbitrary censorship on Twitter since @elonmusk took over.” Sports and political commentator Keith Olbermann was suspended while one of Engadget’s editors was reading a thread on his account. Olbermann’s last tweets also included criticisms of Musk’s announcement that he’s taking legal action against Sweeney and Twitter’s policy changes after the suspension of the Musk’s stalker incident. Aaron Rupar, an independent journalist who was also suspended, posted a response on Substack and said he tweeted that the “@ElonJet account that was suspended from Twitter was still active on Facebook, with a link to the Facebook page.”

As you can see, most of the banned accounts talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way. Before the account got permanently suspended, it tracked flights of Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. (Other accounts tracking the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals got suspended, as well.) Musk announced a policy change for Twitter after the account’s suspension that prohibits the doxxing of real-time location info. In a response to that announcement, he said the car carrying his child was followed by a stalker. He also said that he is taking legal action against Sweeney and organizations “who supported harm to [his] family.”

Engadget reached out to Twitter for a statement, and we’ll update this post when we hear back. But replying to a user saying they’ve confirmed that the suspended accounts linked to @ElonJet, Musk insinuated that they were booted off the website due to its new doxxing rules. He also said in a separate tweet that criticizing him “all day long is totally fine, but doxxing [his] real-time location and endangering [his] family is not.”

Following the suspensions, The Washington Post Executive Editor Sally Buzbee released a statement via Mastodon saying that Harwell’s suspension “directly undermines Elon Musk’s claim that he intends to run Twitter as a platform dedicated to free speech.” CNN said it asked Twitter why the website banned journalists and would “reevaluate [its] relationship based on that response.” Meanwhile, Musk said on Twitter that accounts “engaged in doxxing receive a temporary 7 day suspension” as a response to his tweet insinuating that the journalists were banned due to the website’s new doxxing rules.  

Later in the evening, Musk joined a Spaces chat hosted by BuzzFeed journalists. He was confronted by Drew Harwell, who was supposed to be suspended, consequently highlighting a “bug” in Spaces itself. 

Twitter ultimately ended up pulling the Spaces feature because it allowed suspended accounts to join voice chats. Musk had earlier left the chat silently after being asked the reasons behind the suspensions.