After some journalists who had just been suspended from the social network discovered they could still participate on it, Twitter’s live audio function, Twitter Spaces, was shut down. Elon Musk, the owner of Twitter, announced late on Thursday that the organisation was resolving an old fault and that the audio service “should be operating tomorrow.” Earlier that evening, Musk’s network suspended journalists for seven days, including those from CNN, the Washington Post, and the New York Times, for allegedly leaking the whereabouts of his private jet.
Drew Harwell of the Washington Post and Matt Binder of Mashable, two of the suspended reporters, joined BuzzFeed News writer Katie Notopoulos on Twitter Spaces to discuss the sudden wave of suspensions, which came without warning to either the journalists or their publications. They could no longer post new tweets and their old ones were no longer viewable, but they could still interact with other users on the Spaces site.
Musk also joined the session after it attracted thousands of listeners to bluntly state that anyone who doxxes—gives another person’s personal location information—will be suspended. He argued that the media had not published any real-time flight data, but by that time the millionaire had ended the call. At its height, the conversation gathered more than 40,000 listeners.
According to a later post by Notopoulos, Twitter Spaces crashed while her session was still going on, disconnecting everyone. There is currently no recording or information on Twitter about that session.
