The accounts of several journalists were permanently suspended by Twitter Thursday night, and the move by new owner Elon Musk to ban them has been widely discussed Friday morning. On CNN This Morning, anchor Don Lemon believed the show, and the media as a whole, are playing into Musk’s hand.
While discussing the actions taken by the billionaire with a panel including CNN media reporter Oliver Darcy and CNN media analyst Sara Fischer, Lemon said Musk’s actions showed a clear lack of vision for the social media platform.
“It’s probably a combination of lack of a plan — I think it’s poor planning; there is no plan, and thin skin is basically what it is. (He’s) just making you-know-what up as he goes,” Lemon said.
“The challenge here is: there is no consistency,” Fischer said. “He said that these journalists were banned because they doxxed him. This isn’t what doxxing is. Doxxing is posting someone’s personally identifiable information — their address, email address, phone number — with malintent. Basically, to ensure that person gets harassed. What these journalists were doing was posting links to an account to a different social media site — because Elon Musk banned it from Twitter — that had publicly available information about Elon Musk’s jet location and they were aggregating it and posting it.
“This is not some unique thing to Elon Musk,” Fischer continued. “In the past, people have done this with celebrities all the time. Tracking Taylor Swift’s jet, Kim Kardashian’s jet. To equate that with doxxing does not seem at all consistent with the principles that he said and it makes it hard for us as journalists to figure out how we even abide by the new Elon Musk ‘rules’ when they’re not so consistent.”
“We’re talking about it. Is this what he wants?,” Lemon asked. “That we’re talking about it and it doesn’t matter…all of the sudden everyone is going to be reinstated and it’s a whole Trump thing, where you own the news cycle for the next 24 hours and then you do something else that is hyperbolic and outrageous then you own the news cycle. Why are we doing it?”
“He knows if he bans journalists, we’re gonna talk about it,” concluded Lemon. “He needs attention because he needs eyes on Twitter. He is accomplishing exactly what he wants to accomplish. That’s all this is.”
