After Being Restored by Elon Musk, Journalists’ Accounts Cannot Access Twitter Features

The journalists who held the conference at Spaces (photo: twitter @atrupar)

JAKARTA - Last week a number of journalists' Twitter accounts based in the United States (US) experienced account suspension by their new owner, Elon Musk. But after opening, their accounts actually lose access to the features of the platform.

The journalists are Donie O'Sullivan of CNN International, Ryan Mac of The New York Times, Drew Harwell of The Washington Post, Micah Flee of The Intercept, and Steve Herman of Voice of America (VoA).

There are also independent journalist Aaron Rupar, and Mashable reporter Matt Binder and other journalists who have covered Musk in recent weeks.

Their accounts were suspended on Thursday, December 15 evening, Musk accused these journalists of sharing personal information about his whereabouts, but he provided no evidence for his claims.

this is what i currently see when trying to join any Twitter Spaces chat pic.twitter.com/E7i88GVzqv

— Matt Binder (@MattBinder) December 17, 2022

However, after their accounts became accessible again on Saturday, December 17, O'Sullivan and Harwell were asked to delete their tweets, with the exception of Mashable's Matt Binder who did not have access to Spaces, Twitter's live audio service.

The requirement to remove offensive tweets isn't new, but the loss of access to Spaces appears to be Twitter's new rule of the lasting effects suspensions have.

On Friday, December 16, Buzzfeed reporter Katie Notopoulos went live on Spaces to discuss the suspension of the journalist's account and was joined by Harwell and Binder, they are the reporters whose accounts were suspended.

While neither of them could post new tweets or view their old tweets, Harwell and Binder were able to access Spaces due to a bug. After a discussion that reached thousands of listeners, Musk joined in later declaring anyone doing the doxxing would be suspended.

The journalists later said they were not posting real time flight data, as Musk had claimed, he then ended the call.

According to Notopoulos in a tweet, shortly after Musk fled the call, Spaces was removed from the entire platform to fix what Musk claimed were legacy errors.

Spaces is back

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022

On VOI's monitoring today, Spaces is back. It seems that the bug fix only adds the ability to prevent blocked accounts from accessing Spaces.

Evidently, even though Binder's account has been released from suspension, he is currently unable to access the feature.