A Suspended Journalist and a Litigator Discuss Latest Spate of Suspensions at Twitter

The criticism was immediate, and has only intensified, since Elon Musk suspended several high-profile journalists from Twitter on Thursday, Dec. 15. The suspensions came a day after Twitter changed its policy on sharing live location information and banned an account known as ElonJet, which tracked the movement of Musk's private jet using public flight data. Most of the banned journalists appear to have been reporting about these developments and to have written critically of Musk's chaotic management of Twitter.

The suspensions caused an intense backlash and accusations of violating press freedom, leading to Musk reinstating all but one of the suspended accounts by Saturday, Dec. 17.

KQED's Tara Siler spoke with one of the suspended journalists, Micah Lee, who is director of information security at The Intercept, and with David Loy, legal director of the First Amendment Coalition.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Tara Siler: Can you tell us what you'd been writing about before your account was suspended, and did you receive any explanation as to why it was suspended?

Micah Lee: Nope, no communication at all. My account was just suddenly banned and so I'm not even completely sure that this is the reason why. It just seems very likely because it was very shortly after I posted a tweet about ElonJet, and about 20 or 30 minutes later my account got permanently suspended. [But] I've spent the last month writing a bunch of articles that are pretty critical of Elon Musk and of the direction Twitter is going in. One of the stories that I reported on was how Elon Musk was basically directly asking right-wing extremists on Twitter who should get kicked off the site. And then in response to that, they kicked off a bunch of very high-profile left-wing accounts that have never broken any rules.

And it was directly at the request of specific right-wing influencers on Twitter. This includes some prominent anti-fascist accounts with hundreds of thousands of followers: CrimethInc., an anarchist collective that's been publishing books since the '90s, and just yesterday an anarchist news website called It's Going Down. So that's one of the stories that I did.

I've also reported about a Twitter ban of Distributed Denial of Secrets. This is a group that actually was banned in 2020 during the Black Lives Matter protests. And they publish "how can we" documents. And so they published some documents that showed a lot of police misconduct, including police spying on activists. And they've been banned ever since then. When Elon Musk took over Twitter, he started unbanning former President Donald Trump and Marjorie Taylor Greene and stuff, but he refuses to unban accounts that aren't basically on the far right.

It would seem most of these journalists were reporting about the recent policy changes at Twitter in the suspension of this particular account known as ElonJet. Musk is claiming these reporters were doxxing him by endangering him and his family. I mean, how does that square with your understanding of doxxing?

David Loy: Reporting on publicly available data is not, in my view, a form of doxxing. Doxxing, as I understand it, is revealing that which is truly private — someone's Social Security number, someone's home address. Truly personal, private information. Flight data is publicly available from the FAA or otherwise. There's any number of websites which track flight data in real time for both commercial and private jets. This is not in any way truly private information that, as I understand it, falls within the ordinary term or ordinary understanding of the term "doxxing."

Musk has long touted himself as this so-called free speech absolutist. I'm wondering what you think that even means on today's Twitter platform or in the context of social media in general.

Lee: Free-speech absolutism is an extreme position to take because it means that Nazi content and child pornography are just fair game. Typically, being a free-speech absolutist means that you think there shouldn't be any content moderation. And that's clearly not what he believes.

He believes in a lot of content moderation. I think what he means by free-speech absolutism is free speech for the far right, a lot of whom were getting suspended and suppressed in various ways in the old days of Twitter. So he's undoing that. But I think it also means censorship of the left. I think that's his version of free-speech absolutism. He is in charge, so he gets to make the rules according to his whims now.

Twitter is a private company, so I'm just wondering if you can tell us, is there anything illegal about these suspensions?

Loy: It does not violate the First Amendment for a private company to decide who it will or will not host on its platform. So this may not be illegal in that sense, but that doesn't make it a good thing, right? Whether or not Twitter is allowed to ban journalists at will or at whim, I do not believe it should do so. Banning journalists is antithetical to freedom of speech. Elon Musk has called himself a free speech advocate. But by banning journalists from Twitter and impairing their ability to report the news and gather the news, he is violating the very principles that he purports to uphold.

Twitter's a vital news-gathering tool that many journalists rely upon to do their jobs, and the public — now more than ever — depends on journalists to gather, produce, provide and distribute information and facts to promote transparency and accountability and fight disinformation. When Twitter or Facebook or any other platform holds itself out as a common space or a town square, if you will, and engages and invites the public and journalists in particular to participate, then I think it has held itself to a higher obligation than the mere minimum of what the First Amendment requires or allows and should be devoted to freedom of speech, press freedom, and reporting and critiquing the actions of the powerful and the wealthy, and to hold them accountable to the principles that they hold.

I know some members of Congress are criticizing these suspensions, and I'm just wondering what, if anything, lawmakers can do, given that, again, this is a private company.

Loy: Certainly it would be beyond the pale for the government to tell Twitter or any other platform who it must host or not, who it must platform or not — just like the government cannot tell a newspaper what content to print or whose articles to print, or whose editorials or letters to print, or whose op-ed to print or not.

The First Amendment does guarantee editorial discretion to owners of platforms and publishers. [But] it is certainly within the authority of lawmakers or anyone else to discuss the issue, to express critiques of the particular decision, to say, "Well, Mr. Musk, you have held yourself out as a free speech advocate, and yet you are acting in ways that seem to violate your own principles." And that's certainly a fair topic for debate and discussion. But certainly the government should not be in the business of telling or commanding publishers or platforms what they must publish or who they must publish.

Looking forward, should journalists be looking for ways to reduce our dependance on social media platforms like Twitter or Facebook? Is that even possible today?

Lee: Absolutely journalists should be reducing their dependance on any single social media platform. I think that's a real problem that a lot of journalists have right now, [because they're] so addicted to Twitter specifically. Like me. I have this big following on Twitter and I don't really have a big following on all of these other platforms.

And this means that Elon Musk can just, at his whim, kick off journalists, kick off whole newsrooms, and then they lose their whole audience. So I think that it will be very wise for journalists to start expanding beyond Twitter and also beyond Facebook and just use multiple platforms, try and build an audience in multiple places so that there's not a single point of failure.