Journalist Aaron Rupar on the ‘chilling effect’ of being suspended by Twitter

By Sara Guaglione

Aaron Rupar, a former Vox journalist who now works independently, was one of the journalists who had their Twitter accounts suspended last evening.

While it’s still unclear what exactly these journalists did to get locked out of their accounts, new Twitter owner Elon Musk in a series of tweets claimed the journalists had violated his “doxxing” policy by sharing his “exact real-time” location. However, none of the banned journalists shared Musk’s real-time location and instead linked to or had recently reported on social platform Mastodon and the @ElonJet account that shares the location of Musk’s private jet using publicly available information.

Digiday spoke with Rupar to hear his thoughts on his Twitter suspension and what it means for his work and business.

This conversation has been edited and condensed.

How did you find out your Twitter account got suspended?

I was actually playing on the floor with my seven-month-old in the evening. My phone started blowing up. And it was people either emailing me or on Instagram saying, “Oh, my goodness, your Twitter account is suspended.” … So I pulled up Twitter and sure enough, at the top of my page there was a notice that my account had been permanently suspended. I hadn’t heard anything at that time at all from Twitter.

I was left to basically do some reporting, contacting other reporters and people who had also been banned as part of this wave of banishment to try and figure out what was going on. We figured out over time that it seemed to have to do with a tweet I posted — and other people posted similar tweets — linking to the Facebook page for the Elon Jet account, which had been banned from Twitter. I had posted a link to that account early Wednesday morning, right when the Twitter page for that account had been banned. And then hours later, Elon announced on Twitter that the new terms of service made it a violation even to link to pages like that. And so essentially I ended up being banned for something that wasn’t a terms of service violation when I posted it, but retroactively ended up being one. It was kind of a throwaway tweet. Had I known I certainly would not have chanced getting banned, but it just never occurred to me that simply linking to a public Facebook page could constitute a violation of this sort.

What did you do after you found out?

[I reached out] to someone from Twitter’s trust and safety team. Many hours later, deep into the evening, I heard [from them] confirming that [was why I got banned]. It does sound like our accounts eventually will be reinstated. The person who I was in touch with couldn’t clarify when that might be. I saw that Elon has a poll on his page asking if it should be immediate or in a week. There’s no option for permanent. But it still does say on my account that I am permanently suspended. So …read more

Source:: Digiday