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Irish Mirror
Irish Mirror
National
Clare McCarthy

Irish CNN journalist Donie O'Sullivan suspended from Twitter after covering Elon Musk controversies

An Irish journalist has had his Twitter account suspended after covering controversies surrounding new Twitter owner Elon Musk.

Donie O'Sullivan, who is from Kerry and works for CNN in the US, was suspended from Twitter on Thursday night along with a number of other reporters who recently wrote about the tycoon.

In response to the account suspensions, Elon Musk tweeted that Twitter rules banning the sharing of personal information, called doxxing, applied to everyone on the site, including journalists.

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He wrote: "Same doxxing rules apply to 'journalists' as to everyone else."

Elon's tweet referred to the controversial suspension of @elonjet, a Twitter account tracking and sharing the whereabouts of his private jet - using data that is publicly available.

It appears that the reporters suspended on Thursday night had been writing about the new Twitter 'doxxing' policy, which later saw them locked out of their accounts.

Speaking on CNN, Donie was asked why his account got suspended, with the journalist replying: "We reported on Elon Musk.

"We were talking about the world's second richest man who runs Twitter. He has been annoyed that there's been this account - that's been active for years now - which tracks the movements of his private jet.

"So we reported how yesterday he shut that account down and tonight we continued to report on it."

Donie said that he didn't share the location of Elon's private jet, he was simply covering the story but was still banned from the site, and said the move raised questions about Elon Musk's supposed support of free speech.

"He is claiming on social media that I, and other journalists, shared the precise live location of his jet and therefore that's why he kicked us off because we caused a danger to him.

"Certainly, in my case, I didn't; we just posted stories about what was happening and shutting down those accounts.

"But I think the bigger issue here of course is this is supposed to be the guy who is a free speech absolutist."

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