After banning journalists from The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and elsewhere last night, Elon Musk hopped into a Twitter Spaces chat being held by other journalists discussing the bans. He reiterated his claim that posting publicly-available data about air travel, such as his private jet's, is "doxxing". Drew Harwell of The Washington Post—banned by Musk from Twitter but evidently not from Twitter Spaces, asked him a difficult follow-up question:
Drew Harwell: You're suggesting that we're sharing your address, which is not true. And you're suggesting that we're posting-
Elon Musk: It is true.
Harwell: I never posted your address.
Elon Musk: You posted a link to the address.
Harwell: In the course of reporting about ElonJet we posted links to Elon Jet, which are now not online, and now banned on Twitter
Host Katie Notopoulous, of BuzzFeed News, soon jumped in to try and move the discussion to a new topic, but Elon had already quit the meeting
Then the space was shut down.
Then Twitter Spaces was shut down.
Bloomberg reports that because Twitter Spaces was originally a separate company, Periscope, banning people from Twitter doesn't stop them using Twitter Spaces—and that Elon might not have been able to find anyone on Twitter's much-reduced staff who can access Periscope's user management backend.
Notopoulous reports that Musk unfollowed her, but her account appears to remain good standing for now:
An important thing to draw from all this is not that Elon and co. are hypocrites. It's that they're insincere. "Hypocrisy!" is an allegation that depends upon a betrayal of principle or presumed good faith. But the principle was never held, and was only ever claimed in bad faith. When you call a liar a hypocrite, he smiles because he knows that you still haven't freed yourself from the lie.
Update: A day later, Spaces is back up.
