Elon Musk reinstates Twitter accounts of suspended journalists

Elon Musk has lifted the suspensions of the Twitter accounts of several journalists he had banned a day earlier, after the second poll he conducted on the topic went against his preferred outcome.

After an initial poll supported an immediate reversal of the bans on Thursday, Musk said there were too many options, and ran another poll for 24 hours with just two options: to keep the ban in place for seven days, or lift the ban immediately.

After close to 3.7m votes, users voted to lift the ban 58.7% to 41.3%.

In a tweet shortly after, Musk said he would lift the bans, and several of those users returned to the platform.

The ElonJet account that was dedicated to tweeting the location of his private jet remained suspended at the time of reporting.

The suspension of the accounts of reporters who cover Musk was widely condemned by their employers, other media organisations, the EU and the United Nations.

It was a chaotic 24 hours on Twitter even by the standard set by Musk since he took over the platform. In a Twitter Spaces event after the suspensions were announced, Musk briefly entered and was questioned by some of the journalists who had their accounts suspended, but were nevertheless able to participate in the Spaces event.

After further questioning from the host, BuzzFeed News tech reporter Katie Notopoulos, Musk left the event, and not long after the Space abruptly ended and was then deleted entirely by Twitter.

Twitter also targeted its nearest rival, Mastodon, banning linking to several Mastodon servers and blocking users from adding their Mastodon username to their profile.