Twitter abruptly suspended the accounts of at the very least six tech journalists on Thursday night, together with reporters for the New York Instances, Washington Publish and CNN.

Lots of the reporters had lately tweeted a couple of dispute between Elon Musk, the social community’s new proprietor, and a consumer who ran a collection of accounts that use publicly out there flight info to trace the placement of personal jets, together with the one utilized by Musk. The suspensions, which seem to have occurred round 4:30 p.m. PT, embrace Washington Publish expertise reporter Drew Harwell, New York Instances expertise reporter Ryan Mac and CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan.

Aaron Rupar, a Substack author who was additionally suspended Thursday, mentioned he is dumbfounded by his suspension.

“I do not know what guidelines I purportedly broke,” Rupar wrote on Substack. “I have not heard something from Twitter in any respect.”

Rupar mentioned he “posted a tweet late final night time noting that Musk appeared to violate Twitter’s coverage in opposition to posting footage of somebody with out their consent in a tweet he posted yesterday. But it surely’s onerous to think about how both of these issues violated Twitter’s insurance policies.”

Twitter on Wednesday suspended the @ElonJet account, together with different accounts that tracked the non-public planes of Mark Zuckerberg, Jeff Bezos and Invoice Gates, after updating its privateness coverage to ban posting or linking to details about an individual’s bodily location or journey route, no matter whether or not the data is publicly out there.

After suspending @ElonJet, Musk tweeted that “any account doxxing real-time location information of anybody shall be suspended, as it’s a bodily security violation. This contains posting hyperlinks to websites with real-time location information.” 

Doxxing is the apply of posting figuring out details about a person on-line, comparable to their actual title, dwelling tackle or telephone quantity.

Twitter, which not has a communications division, did not instantly reply to a request for remark. However Musk responded to a tweet concerning the suspensions with a one-sentence response that learn: “Similar doxxing guidelines apply to ‘journalists’ as to everybody else.”

Musk has had a protracted working dispute with Jack Sweeney, the 20-year-old pupil who operates the account. Earlier this 12 months, Musk reportedly provided Sweeney $5,000 to take down the account, however the 20-year-old pupil refused, saying $5,000 wasn’t sufficient for the satisfaction he obtained from his work.

CNN referred to as the suspensions “impulsive and unjustified,” including that “Twitter’s growing instability and volatility must be of unimaginable concern for everybody who makes use of the platform.”

Different journalists suspended Thursday night embrace Mashable reporter Matt Binder, Intercept reporter Micah Lee and former MSNBC host Keith Olberman, who had criticized Musk in tweets. 

Twitter has been considerably chaotic since Musk accomplished his buy of Twitter on Oct. 27. About half the Twitter employees was laid off solely days after Musk took cost, and the positioning briefly launched a brand new “blue test” verification service solely to be plagued with trolls and pretend “verified” accounts.

An account that helped Twitter customers signup at rival social community Mastodon was additionally suspended Thursday.