Elon Musk bans Twitter accounts for ‘doxxing’ after demanding personal details of a total stranger
Elon Musk suspended several journalists amid the debaucle. (Getty)
Twitter CEO Elon Musk has banned several users for what he has called ‘doxxing’ less than a day after requesting the details of a stranger.
The former richest man in the world made the claim that he would ban accounts “doxxing real-time location info” in a Thursday (15 December) tweet.
Doxxing refers to revealing private information of someone without their consent – typically a home address or personal details.
“Any account doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended,” he wrote in a Thursday (15 December) tweet, “as it is a physical safety violation. This includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
“Posting locations someone travelled to on a slightly delayed basis isn’t a safety problem, so is ok.”
Less than three hours later, Musk shared a recording of an individual who was reportedly following a car thinking it was the Twitter CEO, asking people to work out who it was.
Musk claimed that the individual blocked a car carrying his child, thinking that the Tesla owner was inside, and proceeded to climb on the hood.
Thousands of users in the comments of the tweet are now sharing locational information, pictures of people they suggest might be the individual, and various other pieces of private information.
Musk then proceeded to suspend several journalists and notable Twitter names for what he claimed was “doxxing” his personal information.
What he actually meant was that several journalists – including The New York Times’ Ryan Mac, CNN‘s Donie O’Sullivan, and several others – shared links to the now suspended account ElonJet in their respective articles, which tracks the real-time locational information of Elon Musk’s private jet.
ElonJet and its account creator were suspended prior to Musk’s change of policy on doxxing for sharing this information – which is freely available online and entirely legal.
Interestingly, moments before being banned, journalist Donie O’Sullivan shared a comment he received from LA police saying that no criminal reports had been filed about the blocked car incident.
Musk claimed that the suspended journalists had shared his “real-time location” and endangered his “family.”
But – after managing to join a Twitter Space voice chatroom despite being suspended – Drew Harnell told Musk, who later joined the chatroom, that posting the links to an account sharing public information that has since been suspended is not “doxxing.”
He also accused Elon Musk of hypocrisy, saying that Musk was using “link blocking” methods – which he has previously denounced – to stop people sharing ElonJet’s Instagram and their Mastadon accounts.
“It’s no more acceptable for you than it is for me,” Elon said, before being questioned on what he was saying was acceptable. “You dox, you get suspended end of story, that’s it.”
Twitter CEO Elon Musk then immediately left without warning.
Additionally, amid the debaucle, Musk also suspended the Twitter account for Mastodon, which had been making waves as an alternative to the social media platform after his acquisition.
Links to Mastodon are now flagged as unsafe and tweets attempting to use them will be prevented from posted.
All the while, Musk kept posting various eyebrow-raising tweets, including that he loves the singer Barbara Streisand, which Twitter flagged as alluding to the “Streisand Effect,” referring to the attempts to suppress information causing it to be further exposed.
A few hours after, he then created two polls – one with 530,000 responses that was scrapped and another with 1.5 million votes – in which he asked whether the accounts should be suspended.
At the time of reporting, the option to unsuspend the accounts is currently winning.
