Let’s agree on one thing first: for a journalist, politician, public figure or any person for that matter, to have access to a social network is not a human right.

Yet, social media has for years tried to push the ideas of connecting people, being a town square and giving equal opportunity to all.

I believe that era ended when Elon Musk suspended the accounts of journalists covering him or his companies overnight without giving a valid reason.

The accounts got reinstated after most users voted to unsuspend them immediately in a poll Musk ran (which seems to be the new moderation policy on the platform, I guess) – but the fact remains that independent reporters can now be blocked on a whim on Twitter, without any good reason, and their reinstatement seemingly depends on the benevolence of one person rather than a coherent set of rules.

Why Elon Musk banned journalists and Mastodon

It all started by Musk accusing the @ElonJet account, which had been by Jack Sweeney and shared publicly available information on the flight path for Musk’s private jet, that a stalker used the information to find and climb on the hood of a car carrying one of his children.

As The Verge pointed out, it is very unclear how the location of the jet led to the stalker learning the location of the car.

Yet, Musk gave this reason for banning the account and all similar ones tracking other wealthy people’s jets run by Sweeney.

Twitter under Musk also began blocking links to Mastodon, a competing decentralised social network. Mastodon’s Twitter account was suspended after it tweeted a link to the ElonJet Mastodon account, The Verge reported.

The implications of banning critical press and alternatives for journalists

One of the biggest benefits of social media for news media has been their centralised character. You could suddenly amass large audiences or go viral and reach many people because they all used the same service.

At one point there has been this notion among some in the media, and I was part of the camp for a while as well, that because of social networks and the tools they have given us we don’t really need to build websites.

Or put simply, you could outsource the “content hosting” and just focus on building an audience and create content.

The opposing side has been very critical of this approach and warned of the fickle nature of tech company leaders and their incentives.

Building an audience with a blog, newsletter, podcast or decentralised social network should be your main priority, they said. And they were right.

We have seen this play out several times. Company A or publisher A finds a hack, grows quickly, then the algorithm changes, reach falls, revenue goes away, dreams get crushed and most importantly people lose their jobs.

In the beginning of November, I was among some of the Twitter users that tweeted out a link to their newsletter and asked followers to subscribe in case something happened to the site as many employees were fired. 

At the time I couldn’t even imagine that Musk would go as far as to ban journalists from The New York Times or The Washington Post for no reason and without any formal notice.

This kind of behaviour has been seen among autocrats to get rid of critics in countries that are not democratic.

Elon Musk has all the right to ban anyone from his privately owned social network.

At the same time, it is our right to call him out on his actions and seriously consider whether as journalists we want to support such a network that’s going after free press.

Recently, I have been scaling back my own usage of Twitter, have increased my presence and activity on LinkedIn which I find as valuable as the blue bird network or even more so in terms of networking. And I can get breaking news elsewhere even if it takes longer to get to me.

Source of the cover photo: https://depositphotos.com/

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