It sure looks like Twitter big cheese Elon Musk has done the tech version of taking your ball and going home because you don’t like how the game is going.
Twitter Spaces, a group audio feature on the social media platform, abruptly stopped working Thursday after a number of journalists used a Spaces chat to confront Musk about Twitter policies.
Earlier that day, the site had suspended a number of tech journalists, many of whom had previously written about Musk, for supposedly sharing his “real-time location and endangering [his] family.”
The self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” also claimed that the banned journalists had effectively posted “assassination coordinates” in their reporting about @ElonJet ― a Twitter account (now also suspended) that posted the billionaire’s flight schedule using publicly available information.
After the journalists were suspended, Musk decided it would be a good idea to participate in a Twitter Spaces chat hosted by BuzzFeed News reporter Katie Notopoulos to defend the company’s actions to... other journalists. (BuzzFeed News and HuffPost share a parent company, BuzzFeed Inc.)
It wasn’t pretty, especially after many people in the chat noted that the banned journalists hadn’t shared Musk’s location, but merely reported that the @ElonJet account had been suspended.
“Everyone on this call would not like that to be done to them,” Musk said. “There is not going to be any distinction in the future between journalists, so-called journalists, and regular people. Everyone’s gonna be treated the same. You’re not special because you’re a journalist.”
At least three of the people whose accounts were suspended were in the Spaces chat: Matt Binder from Mashable; Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old college student behind ElonJets; and Drew Harwell from The Washington Post, who confronted Musk about the reasoning behind his suspension.
“You’re suggesting that we’re sharing your address, which is not true. And you’re suggesting that we’re posting ―” Harwell said. Musk interrupted: “It is true.”
After Harwell insisted that he never posted Musk’s address, the billionaire claimed he’d posted a link to the address ― although as Gizmodo noted, “it’s not clear how a flight tracker might be called an address.”
“In the course of reporting about ElonJet, we posted links to ElonJet, which are now not online, and are now banned on Twitter,” Harwell explained.
Harwell then pointed out that Twitter’s new actions, which also include blocking links to the @ElonJet account on other social media platforms, seemed very similar to how Twitter blocked stories about the supposed contents of Hunter Biden’s laptop in 2020.
“Twitter also, of course, marks even the Instagram and Mastodon accounts of ElonJet as harmful, using... we have to admit it, acknowledge, using the same exact link-blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden-New York Post story in 2020,” Harwell said. “So what is different here and there?”
Musk didn’t seem prepared for the question, but he claimed: “It’s no more acceptable for me... for you than it is for me... it’s the same thing.”
“So it’s unacceptable, what you’re doing?” Harwell asked.
“No, what... you doxx, you get suspended, end of story, that’s it,” Musk said.
He then forestalled any further inquiries by leaving the call, which you can hear below.
Shortly after, people noticed that the Twitter Spaces feature of Twitter was no longer working. Musk later tweeted that “we’re fixing a legacy bug,” and said Twitter Spaces should be restored this weekend.
But Twitter users were skeptical. Very skeptical.