A Twitter poll Musk later conducted also showed that most respondents wanted the accounts reinstated immediately.
“The people have spoken. The suspension of the accounts that spied on my location will now be lifted,” Musk said in a tweet on Saturday.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a Reuters request for comment. A Reuters check showed that the suspended accounts, which included journalists from the New York Times, and the Washington Post, have been reinstated.
Authorities from France, Germany, Great Britain and the European Union had condemned the suspensions.
The episode, which a well-known security researcher called a “Thursday night massacre”, is being seen by critics as further proof that Musk, who considers himself a “free speech absolutist”, deletes speeches and users who I personally don’t like them.
Shares of Tesla, the electric car maker led by Musk, plunged 4.7% on Friday, posting its worst weekly loss since March 2020, with investors increasingly worried about the distraction of its president and a slowdown in the economy. World economy.
Roland Lescure, the French industry minister, tweeted on Friday that, following Musk’s suspension of journalists, he would suspend his own activity on Twitter.
Melissa Fleming, the United Nations chief of communications, tweeted that she was “deeply disturbed” by the suspensions and that “media freedom is not a toy.”
The German Foreign Office warned Twitter that it had a problem with moves that endangered press freedom
The suspensions stemmed from a disagreement over a Twitter account called ElonJet, which was tracking Musk’s private plane using publicly available information.
Twitter had on Wednesday suspended the account and others that tracked private jets, despite Musk having previously tweeted that he would not suspend ElonJet in the name of free speech.
Shortly after, Twitter changed its privacy policy to prohibit the sharing of “live location information.”
Then, on Thursday night, several journalists, including from the New York Times, and the Washington Post, were suspended from Twitter without notice.
In an email sent to Reuters overnight, Twitter’s head of trust and security, Ella Irwin, said the team manually reviewed “each and every account” that violated the new privacy policy by posting direct links to ElonJet account.
“I understand that the focus seems to be primarily on journalist accounts, but today we’ve applied the policy equally to journalist and non-journalist accounts,” Irwin said in the email.
The Society for Advancing Business Editing and Writing said in a statement Friday that Twitter’s actions “violate the spirit of the First Amendment and the principle that social media platforms shall allow the unfiltered distribution of information that is already public.” .
Musk accused journalists of posting his real-time location, which is “basically coordinates for the murder” of his family.