Twitter has suspended several journalists in a what seems yet another worrying step for the company under new owner Elon Musk, whose changes have been a bowl of chaos with a side order of human rights concerns.
At least seven journalists – from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN, and others – were suspended by the platform, reportedly permanently, after they had written or tweeted about services that track aircraft.
Flight trackers share publicly available, if sometimes tricky to interpret, data to follow the flights of private planes of government leaders and oligarchs, including Musk’s own jet. The social media platform banned 25 such accounts on Wednesday.
Removing these accounts is difficult to defend based on concerns about privacy or security. Flight data is publicly available elsewhere. Musk is also a public figure whose businesses and government connections are very much in the public interest. To the extent that the flight trackers reveal his location, this information has always been publicly accessible, and any risk to his safety, is not coming from Tweets.
The journalists also did not reveal personal details. They merely reported about or commented on Twitter’s banning of the aircraft-tracking accounts and, in some cases, as a natural part of their reporting, maybe linked to the plane-trackers.
So, why suspend the journalists?
Many note they have been covering Musk and Twitter for some time, and they had also written critically of him in the past.
The more immediate cause, however, may be an incident in which Musk claims his child’s car was followed by a “crazy stalker.” Never mind it was a car, not a plane – anyone can overreact when they feel their family is threatened.
But whether Musk was annoyed at some critical journalists or misdirecting his concern over personal security, either way, the snap decision drives home how one person now dominates the social media platform.
And concentration of power is the core problem.
If we accept Twitter is important – if it has become central to the way we share information today – then surely control over the speech of millions should not be up to the whims or momentary frustrations of a single individual.
As we keep saying, these critical platforms need more democratic oversight.