The ‘free speech absolutist’ banned at least nine reporters who’ve been critical of him from Twitter.
The ‘free speech absolutist’ banned at least nine reporters who’ve been critical of him from Twitter. Crypto, which lives and dies in the Twitterverse, had better take notice.
At least nine journalists from publications including the New York Times, Washington Post and CNN have been banned from Twitter by its new owner, self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” Elon Musk.
NBC News reporter Ben Collins was among those announcing the bans on — where else — Twitter beginning around 8 p.m. ET. The bans started with several reporters on the Musk beat, but appeared to grow to include several others announcing — and criticizing — the bans.
CNN veteran, pundit and podcaster Keith Olbermann was banned shortly after posting a tweet that read, in part:
“1/So here’s a plan.
EVERYBODY Retweet the screenshot of the tweet that apparently got the count of Drew Harrell of the Washington Post suspended”
Harrell was suspended after a post reporting Musk’s suspension of Twitter competitor Mastodon’s account after it posted a link to its own version of the recently suspended @ElonJet account, which tracks the private jet of the Tesla and SpaceX CEO — based on publicly available flight data.
Harrell’s tweet ended, “Loving the free speech.”
While only about half of the journalists banned had been talking about @ElonJets, the move came a day after Musk posted “Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.”
Wither Crypto Twitter?
Several hours earlier, on the CoinMarketCap YouTube channel, three crypto journalists and citizen journalists joined CMC Academy’s own Connor Sephton for a discussion on “Crypto Journalism in the Age of Elon Musk’s Twitter” that focused on the impact Musk’s ownership of the social media giant will have on the cryptocurrency industry.
“We’re almost a Twitter-first publication,” Bitcoin Magazine editor Pete Rizzo said. “When you're talking about delivering news and information […] to the cryptoverse you have to be on Twitter. That's kind of where everything is.”
Adding that Twitter is “almost where the entire conversation takes place,” Rizzo, who was founding editor of crypto news site CoinDesk in 2013, said:
“I think since about 2015, it's really been the main source for crypto news. Before that, maybe it was more Reddit, community-based small chat rooms. But yeah, Twitter is just so large and so dominant now. I like to say, you know, Twitter defines the reality of crypto. That's how big it is for our ecosystem.”
Which makes selectively censoring it a problem.
An interesting way to think about Twitter is as a news outlet, which leads to the question, “if Twitter is a new source, who is the editor?” said Joon Ian Wong, a crypto journalist and event creator since 2013. “Well, it used to be the safety team, but now the editor is Elon Musk, right?
But if you think of it in that way, Twitter is the biggest publication on earth — far too large to be edited “with any degree of human effort,” Wong said.
Pointing to the banning of @ElonJet, Wong said, the company came up with a broad rule banning posts about the real-time location of individuals. Which is to say, the new “team” edited the Twitter conversation.
So, Wong asked, “Is Twitter now a better or less useful news source? Arguably, it's worse.”
Which leads to another question that ultimately may be vital for Crypto Twitter, Sephton said:
“Is Elon Musk only committed to free speech when it suits him?”
