12/20/2023 0 Comments Andy ngo snopes![]() ![]() The censorship of DDoSecrets is still happening today, two and a half years later. In response to apparent law enforcement pressure, Twitter permanently banned and suppressed all links to. (I’m an adviser to DDoSecrets.)ĭuring the Black Lives Matter protests in the summer of 2020, DDoSecrets published BlueLeaks, a leak of documents from over 200 law enforcement agencies that revealed police misconduct, including spying on activists. DDoSecrets is a nonprofit transparency collective that distributes leaked and hacked documents to journalists and researchers. In November, I wrote about how even though Musk restored popular far-right accounts like Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene, he refused to restore the account of Distributed Denial of Secrets or to stop suppressing links to its website. And the best response to that is to read the work that billionaires would prefer you don’t: Distributed Denial of Secrets I’ve spent the last month writing articles that point out Musk’s hypocrisy as someone who promised to be “ fighting for free speech in America.” While my reporting may not have provided the direct impetus for my suspension, it’s clear Musk was taking aim specifically at journalists who have covered him critically. Musk abruptly left the chat after Harwell pointed out that Twitter had blocked links to the flight-tracking data on Instagram and Mastodon, “using the same exact link-blocking technique that you have criticized as part of the Hunter Biden New York Post story in 2020.” When Harwell said that he had never shared Musk’s address, Musk suggested that any links to the flight-tracking data was the same as giving out his address. Musk’s claim that he had been doxxed was challenged by Drew Harwell, a Washington Post reporter whose account was suspended for reporting on the account. Twitter’s owner insisted that he had been “doxxed” by the account and said that he would ban “so-called journalists” who provided links to other sites where the flight-tracking information showing his private jet’s location could be found. Musk also briefly joined a public Twitter Spaces audio discussion on Thursday night, which included Sweeney and at least two of the tech journalists suspended for reporting on the suspension of his accounts. Then, after and reporters who wrote about it were suspended from the platform, Musk claimed that Sweeney and the journalists who reported on the account had “posted my exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates.” Here’s what it said: Screenshot: Micah Lee/The Intercept ![]() ![]() Before it was banned, Mastodon’s pinned tweet read, “At Mastodon, we present a vision of social media that cannot be bought and owned by any billionaire.”Īs far as I can tell, Twitter probably banned Mastodon’s account because it had tweeted, “Did you know? You can follow on Mastodon over at My tweet pointed out this latest example of Twitter censorship. Mastodon is a decentralized social network where millions of Twitter users have fled since Musk’s purchase. Shortly before I was suspended, I posted about Twitter banning the account of a competitor, Mastodon. This sudden change to Twitter’s rules undercut a pledge Musk had made just six weeks earlier, when he tweeted, shortly after purchasing Twitter for $44 billion: “My commitment to free speech extends even to not banning the account following my plane.” Musk then revised Twitter’s policy to justify his decision. It all started when Musk suspended an account that automatically tweeted the location of Musk’s personal private jet, using public flight information, along with college sophomore Jack Sweeney, who created that account. The suspensions made clear that, with the self-styled “free speech absolutist” at the helm, Twitter users are now subject to arbitrary censorship based on his whims. My suspension is likely temporary, or it could be permanent. Twitter didn’t explain what rules I allegedly broke - but that’s to be expected under the new management, whose transparency has mostly consisted of Musk personally replying to tweets explaining his decision-making. I’m one of at least eight journalists who were casualties of Elon Musk’s “Thursday Night Massacre,” after the billionaire went on a power-hungry suspension spree. Photo: Miguel Roberts/The Brownsville Herald via AP Elon Musk waves while providing an update on the SpaceX Starship, on Feb. ![]()
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