Twitter head Elon Musk sparred with journalists on a voice chat on the platform Thursday about his decision to ban several high-profile accounts he accused of “doxxing” him — before abruptly leaving in the midst of questions from one of the reporters banned from the site.
The group chat, hosted by BuzzFeed reporter Katie Notopoulos, was a discussion of Musk’s decision Thursday to ban several reporters who had tweeted or filed stories on the chief twit’s earlier ban on an account showing the location of his private jet.
Some of those journalists, however, found that they could still join the social media site’s group voice chats, known as “Twitter Spaces.”
“You’re suggesting that we were sharing your address, which is not true,” banned Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell said to Musk after he joined Notopoulos’ chat Thursday night.
“It is true,” Musk replied.
“I never posted your address,” Harwell shot back.
“You posted a link to the address,” Musk claimed.
“In the course of reporting on ElonJet, we posted links to ElonJet — which are now not online and now banned on Twitter,” Harwell responded.
“[That ban uses] the same exact link-blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden New York Post story in 2020,” Harwell continued, referencing Musk’s vociferous criticism of the former Twitter regime’s decision to censor The Post’s reporting on Hunter Biden in the run-up to the 2020 election.
“What is different here?” Harwell asked.
Musk, in a confusing reply, said, “It’s no more acceptable for you than it is for me.”
“So it’s unacceptable what you’re doing?” Harwell asked.
“No,” said Musk. “You dox, you get suspended. End of story, that’s it.”
Notopoulos began to ask Musk a follow-up question, but the Twitter boss’s username had already disappeared.
“Oh, I think Elon has left,” she said.
The voice chat feature was missing from Twitter Friday morning.
“We’re fixing a legacy bug,” Elon tweeted late Thursday when users started to notice the chatrooms were inaccessible. “Should be working tomorrow.”
The account, @ElonJet, was suspended earlier this week — along with accounts tracking the jets of Russian oligarchs or various US government aircraft — due to Musk’s claim that the account was endangering his personal safety.
Flight trackers make use of publicly available data, including the transponder signal broadcast by each aircraft as required by law.
Musk claimed in a tweet Friday that his plane was “actually not trackable without using non-public data.”
While the FAA does allow for temporary transponder codes in some cases to provide privacy to certain aircraft, the visual tail number on the plane would remain unchanged, and observers could link the two without relying on any non-public data.
Musk banned at least 10 journalists who reported on or tweeted about the ElonJet ban, claiming that they had “doxxed” him, giving their followers the embattled Twitter boss’s “exact” location.
“Doxxing” typically refers to the act of sharing a user’s identifying or private information, often with malicious intent.
“They posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates, in (obvious) direct violation of Twitter terms of service,” Musk tweeted.
