Those banned included popular substack author Aaron Rupar, Washington Post reporter Drew Harwell, New York Times reporter Ryan Mac, CNN reporter Donie O’Sullivan, Mashable reporter Matt Binder, independent journalist Tony Webster, Intercept reporter Micah Lee, Voice of America reporter Steve Herman, and former MSNBC host and sports journalist Keith Olbermann.

Several of these reporters had recently reported on Musk’s suspension of the ElonJet account and his filing of a court case against University of Central Florida student Jack Sweeney who created the account. All flight plans and statuses of private and commercial aircraft are public information in the United States. Posting of this information online has already been the subject of numerous legal cases, many involving third-party posting of airline data, with courts consistently ruling that there is no reason to block the posting of this public information.

Some of those banned had posted links to the ElonJet account on a server using the open-source social media platform Mastodon. Earlier on Thursday, Twitter blocked the account through which Mastodon helped new users locate a server and start a Mastodon account. This continued to escalate throughout the day, with Twitter first adding a content warning to any tweet that contained a Mastodon link, then went to hiding Mastodon content and making following a…