- Twitter Spaces was taken offline after suspended journalists were still able to access it.
- Elon Musk joined one of the conversations and was confronted by journalists about the suspensions.
Twitter took its Spaces feature offline after Elon Musk joined one and was confronted by suspended journalists, who still were able to access the feature, about their removal from the platform.
Musk abruptly left the Space hosted by Buzzfeed News tech reporter, Katie Notopoulos, and afterwards, Notopoulos tweeted that the Space was shut down.
A little after 2 a.m. Eastern, actor Sir Maejor, tweeted at Musk, asking what happened with Twitter Spaces.
"It's glitching and won't allow ppl in rooms," Maejor tweeted.
Musk replied that Twitter is "fixing a Legacy bug. Should be working tomorrow."
—Elon Musk (@elonmusk) December 16, 2022
The feature was not back on Twitter as of early Friday morning.
Twitter suspended more than six journalists from the platform on Thursday, all of whom report on Musk regularly. The journalists, including Drew Harwell and Ryan Mac, are from prominent news outlets like The Washington Post, The New York Times, and CNN. Independent journalists including Aaron Rupar and Keith Olbermann were also suspended.
Rupar told Insider he didn't know why he was suspended, and has no information from Twitter about what rule he violated.
But some of the suspended accounts, including Harwell and Jack Sweeney, the college student who runs @ElonJet that tracks Musk's private jet, found they were able to take part in Notopoulos's Twitter Space despite their suspension.
During his appearance in the Space, Musk said "everyone's going to be treated the same, you're not special cause you're a journalist."
"You dox, you get suspended. End of story," Musk said.
He also said "ban evasion" by posting a link to real-time information "is obviously simply trying to evade the meaning." He said it was "no different" than showing the information.
Notopoulos pointed out that Harwell and Mac were reporting on links from @ElonJet showing Musk's location, but Musk said it was still ban evasion, "obviously." Harwell followed up with Musk, saying Twitter is using the same link-blocking technique that Musk criticized when The New York Post's story about Hunter Biden came out in 2020, by blocking links to @ElonJet, and marking the account's Instagram and Mastodon as "harmful."
Musk repeated that users who dox will get suspended, then left the Space.
After the Space was shut down, Notopoulos tweeted that the recording of it was "strangely not available."