The “shock” Sweeney was referring to were his tweets stating that @ElonJet had been removed by Twitter’s moderation system as of December 2. Sweeney posted a screenshot purporting to show Ella Erwin, Twitter’s vice president of trust and safety, asking that team members “apply heavy VF [visibility filtering] to @elonjet immediately.”
BuzzFeed News was unable to authenticate the legitimacy of the screenshot Sweeney provided. The student claimed that he was given it to him by an anonymous source via an untraceable email. Neither Musk nor the press relations team at Twitter, which reportedly no longer exists, immediately responded to a request for comment.
Sweeney knew he was risking Musk’s wrath by posting the allegedly leaked internal message. “From the beginning, he wanted it to go away,” she said. (Musk earlier this year offered the student $5,000 to delete the account. Sweeney, who previously told Rolling Stone created the Twitter account because he was a fan of Musk, he rejected it).
The student titled his tweets about the alleged shadow ban “Twitter Files,” the same thing Musk has been calling a series of Twitter threads, written by journalists of his choosing, about the company’s inner workings. “I’m sure that pissed him off,” Sweeney said. “However, it remains a surprise to many people after he publicly said that he would not do it.”
The creator of @ElonJet said the account suspension showed the risk caused by a single impulsive individual having full control of a social media platform. “It just shows that they can follow the rules however they want, really for whomever they want,” he said.
He thought Twitter would try to excuse the ban as part of a broader crackdown on automated bot accounts, but was surprised the company didn’t provide a reason for banning @ElonJet. “It could really be any number of things at this point, no?” he said.
Later in the day, Musk offered his reasoning behind the suspensions (now Twitter official policy).
