After having their accounts reinstated on Saturday, the tech journalists caught up in the “Thursday Night Massacre,” found that their restored Twitter privileges were incomplete. Many were being required to delete tweets — with the notable exception of Mashable’s Matt Binder — and appeared to lack access to Twitter Spaces.
As of this writing, at least eight of the accounts, including Binder’s, have been reinstated after a Twitter poll tweeted by Musk overwhelmingly supported unbanning. However, many of the journalists, including Donie O’Sullivan and Drew Harwell, were being required to delete tweets. As of Saturday, some were still refusing to do so, meaning they could not yet fully unlock their accounts and tweet again.
The requirement that offending tweets be deleted is not new, but the loss of access to Spaces appears to be a new type of lingering effect brought about by a suspension.
The bizarre chain of events surrounding the discovery of the Spaces glitch appears to have been the cause of the feature being temporarily shut down in the first place.
On Dec. 15, Musk, without warning, banned several high-profile journalists for ostensibly violating Twitter’s doxxing policy. On Dec. 16, Buzzfeed News reporter Katie Notopoulos went live on Twitter Spaces to discuss the bans and was joined by Drew Harwell of the Washington Post and Binder, two of the suspended reporters. Despite neither being able to post new tweets or have their old tweets visible, both were able to access Spaces due to an apparent glitch. After the discussion picked up thousands of listeners, Musk joined in, stating that anyone who doxxes will be suspended. After journalists in Spaces countered Musk, stating that they had not posted any real-time flight data, as he alleged, the billionaire quit the call. According to Notopoulos in a tweet, soon after Musk had fled the call, Twitter Spaces was taken down from the entire platform to fix what Musk claimed was a “legacy bug.”
Spaces is now back up. It appears the bug that was fixed was intended to make sure the suspended accounts weren’t able to access Spaces. But according to Binder on Twitter, despite having his account unsuspended he can’t access the feature at this time.
Massive layoffs and resignations appear to have worsened the platform’s problem with glitches. Twitter’s SMS-based 2-factor authentication broke for a time after Musk claimed to be getting rid of “bloatware,” and the platform’s automated copyright system recently allowed full movies to be posted on Twitter. So in light of all the technical problems, recently-suspended journalists who need access to Spaces should probably not expect speedy tech support.
