CNN’s Jim Acosta says he was locked out of his Twitter account
CNN anchor Jim Acosta claimed Twitter locked him out of his account for several hours — before Elon Musk’s social media site announced on Sunday that anyone who promoted their accounts on other platforms would be suspended.
Acosta revealed that he was unable to access his Twitter page during an interview on Sunday with Insider reporter Linette Lopez, who was among the journalists suspended last week by Musk.
The CNN host told Lopez that he too ran afoul of Musk’s new rules, though his penalty was imposed hours before they were announced.
“I should note my own account was locked overnight by Twitter,” said Acosta, whose comments were first reported by the news media watchdog site Mediaite.
“I’m still trying to sort it out. This feels very arbitrary and a little frenetic.”
Lopez has written several stories critical of Musk’s leadership as CEO of Tesla and SpaceX.
“What people really need to understand about what’s happening at Twitter now, is that it’s being run by Elon’s feelings, and not by any thought about the business model,” Lopez told Acosta.
“It’s almost as if his id is spilling out all over the internet and on Twitter,” she added.
CNN flagged the issue to Twitter and asked the service to reverse Acosta’s ban, according to Mediaite. Acosta’s account has since been reactivated.
The Post reached out to Musk for comment.
Last week, Acosta changed the name display on his Twitter profile to “Jim Acosta is also on Post and Mastodon.”
Acosta also asked his more than 2.2 million Twitter followers to migrate to the other platforms so they could see his posts there.
“Just signed up for Mastodon. I can’t share my account from Mastodon on Twitter. But I can still do this,” Acosta tweeted Friday. This was around the time that Twitter began restricting links to Mastodon accounts because they were deemed by the platform as “harmful.”
Acosta’s tweet was then removed by Twitter. A screenshot of the now-deleted tweet — as seen through the archive site The Wayback Machine — was posted by Mediaite.
Musk, who has won the adoration of conservatives for restoring the accounts of previously banned personalities such as former President Donald Trump, the satirical news site Babylon Bee, author Jordan Peterson and others, has apparently been eager to antagonize liberal journalists.
Acosta was known to have been particularly confrontational with Trump in his role as CNN’s chief White House correspondent during the previous administration.
Last week, Musk temporarily suspended several left-leaning journalists from Twitter, claiming they tweeted information about the real-time whereabouts of his family. He reinstated several of the accounts on Saturday.
Mastodon has emerged as an alternative to Twitter, particularly among a vocal group of journalists who have been critical of Musk since he completed his $44 billion acquisition of the company.
In the weeks since Musk took over Twitter in late October, Mastodon’s user base has grown from 300,000 to 2.5 million, according to the site’s founder, Eugen Rochko.
Mastodon, which is named after an extinct species of an animal that looks like an elephant, is a decentralized, open-source social network whose servers are based in Germany.
Post, the other platform mentioned by Acosta, is a new, Twitter-like app founded by ex-Waze CEO Noam Bardin.
Users on Post, which is still in beta mode and has a waiting list of hundreds of thousands who have applied for accounts, can like, share, comment, and repost content.
Post users will also have the option of monetizing their content by charging “micropayments” in hopes of enticing users with large contingents of followers.
