Taylor Lorenz, a reporter for the Washington Post, has been suspended from Twitter, she announced Saturday night.
Lorenz claimed in a Substack post that Twitter CEO Elon Musk was directly involved in the suspension. He also testified that he did not and has not violated Twitter’s terms of service.
“Tonight Elon Musk suspended my Twitter account,” Lorenz wrote.
Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz is regularly criticized online.
(Photo by Eric BARADAT/AFP) (Photo by ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images) | CNBC Television/YouTube/Screenshot)
In the short post, Lorenz said he only had three active tweets on his account at the time of the suspension, two of which included links to his other social media accounts and a third was a tweet sent to Musk.
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Lorenz said that she and her colleague Drew Harwell, who Musk also banned earlier in the week, were “working on a story involving Musk and were hoping to get [a] comment from him,” she wrote.
“When I went to log in and see if he had responded to our query, I got suspended,” Lorenz said in the Substack post. “I received no communication from the company as to why I was suspended or what terms I violated.”
“I’ve been on Twitter since 2010 and have managed a Twitter account for major media brands including Verizon, WordPress, The Daily Mail, People magazine, The Hill and dozens more,” he added. “Never in my 13 year social media career have I received a single terms of service or community guideline violation, for my personal account or any account I have managed.”
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In the post, Lorenz described Twitter as an “essential source of real-time news” and said the platform has played a “crucial role in the world of journalism.”
However, he criticized Musk’s “arbitrary suspensions of journalists” and said the bans on journalists “should concern anyone who values freedom of speech and expression.”
A photo illustration showing multiple Twitter logos around a photo of Washington Post reporter Taylor Lorenz, who was recently suspended from Twitter, in Hollywood, California on November 30, 2022.
(SAMUEL CORUM/AFP via Getty Images/Tommaso Boddi/Getty Images for Cann)
Musk controversially banned several journalists from the Washington Post, CNN, New York Times and other publications earlier this week, as he claimed they were sharing links to his personal location in real time, information the Twitter CEO referred to as ” murder coordinates.
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Musk was widely criticized for the bans, but initially defended his decision. He said that the journalist would remain suspended from the platform for seven days.
Hours later, Musk changed his focus.
The CEO of Twitter launched two polls asking Twitter users if he should reinstate those who were banned.
After all 3.7 million poll participants were strongly in favor of reinstating them, Musk honored the result.
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Taylor Lorenz and John Green attend VidCon 2019 at the Anaheim Convention Center on July 13, 2019 in Anaheim, California.
(Jerod Harris/Getty Images)
The head of Twitter maintains his criticism of journalists and complains that sharing information in real time puts him and his family members in danger.
As recently as Saturday night, Musk said in a series of tweets that he was an advocate for free speech, but drew a clear line on “doxing,” calling it a “criminal offense.”
“Freedom of expression is the foundation of democracy,” he said in another post.
Lorenz and her feud with Musk persisted before the journalist bans, as she repeatedly criticized, in since-deleted tweets, him and his decision to publish internal documents from former Twitter executives, known simply as the “Twitter Files.” .
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As his critics have pointed out, Lorenz does not shy away from controversy.
He recently made headlines for attacking a colleague as “absurd” for a tweet suggesting people shouldn’t be afraid to leave their homes over COVID concerns and previously mocked the identity of the popular right-wing personality from Twitter Libs of TikTok.
A split image of Washington Post journalist Taylor Lorenz and “The Free Press” founder Bari Weiss.
(MSNBC/Bari Weiss)
“While Taylor Lorenz rails against journalistic ethics, let’s remember the moment George Conway had to take to Twitter to tell him publicly to stop contacting his 15-year-old daughter for dirtying up her mother,” podcaster Noam Blum wrote in a post. tweet on Wednesday. .
In 2020, he repeatedly publicized a 15-year-old girl’s TikTok posts and allegedly contacted the girl directly without her parents’ permission.
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In 2021, Lorenz falsely accused enterprise technology entrepreneur Marc Andreessen of “using the r-slur”, which he later admitted was a mistake.
She was also forced to back down by claiming she was being “relentlessly” harassed by the so-called “Drudge Report editor”, later claiming it was a “joke”.
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As recently as last week, Lorenz publicly criticized his former New York Times colleague, Bari Weiss. Weiss also helped Musk share the “Twitter files.”
Fox News’ Brian Flood contributed to this report.
