CNN’s Oliver Darcy: Banning Journalists ‘Is Exposing Elon Musk’s Lack of Commitment to Free Speech’

SCIUTTO: “New this hour, Elon Musk is claiming falsely that the several journalists he suspended from Twitter yesterday shared his live location. Musk said it was a violation of the so-called doxxing policy by sharing what he called assassination coordinates. The trouble is, his explanation does not line up with the facts. CNN’s senior media correspondent Oliver Darcy joins us now. Oliver, tell us what the facts are here about what exactly these accounts, including our colleague Donie O’Sullivan’s account, shared.”

DARCY: “Well, one, Jim, it is exposing Elon Musk’s lack of commitment to free speech. I think when Elon Musk came in, he talked about how he wanted to make Twitter a beacon of free speech across the world and now you’re seeing that he’s banning journalists from news organizations such as CNN, ‘The New York Times’ and ‘The Washington Post.’ And the reason he’s doing this or the reason he says he’s doing this is because they were supposedly doxxing him. That is not true. What these journalists were doing was reporting on an account called ElonJet, which used public available account information or flight information to track Elon Musk’s jet. This isn’t unique to Elon Musk. There are a lot of these bots that track where celebrities like Taylor Swift or Kim Kardashian are going. But Elon Musk hated this account, he did not like it, so he changed the Twitter rules this week to ban that account. These journalists who he banned later were just covering this as a news story and he then decided to ban them from Twitter. And I think this is raising a number of issues, Jim. Obviously, it highlights how Musk doesn’t really have that commitment to free speech that he said he does, but it also raises questions about what the future of the free press looks like on Twitter. Of course, you know, Twitter is a private platform so they could do what they want, but news organizations have provided a lot of content to Twitter over the years, news is sort of the life blood of Twitter, and if they decide now that they don’t want to be on this platform because he’s banning their journalists, I think it raises some questions about the future.”

SCIUTTO: “Our colleague Pete Muntean has made the point that all planes have tail numbers and you often see similar flight information about government jets.”