The new policy was announced just as Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz’s account was restored after being suspended Saturday night. At the time of her suspension, Lorenz had deleted all but three tweets, two of which encouraged people to follow her elsewhere. The third tweet was from Lorenz responding to Elon Musk, asking him to comment on a story she had emailed him about.
“As someone who covers content creators, I am quite surprised by this policy because it is very hostile towards influencers,” Lorenz told BuzzFeed News. “Cross promotion on social media is necessary.”
Earlier this week, Twitter suspended the accounts of several other journalists, including technology reporter Drew Harwell, also of the Washington Post, and Ryan Mac of the New York Times and formerly BuzzFeed News. The suspensions were related to links involving the @ElonJet account, an account that tweeted the tracking of Musk’s private jet flight. After saying he would continue to allow the bot earlier this fall, Musk suspended it this week. After a poll on Twitter, most of the suspended journalists got their accounts back.
Twitter also suspended the official account of the Mastodon social platform this week, in addition to disabling the links to it.
