Twitter early Saturday lifted bans against several journalists covering Twitter owner Elon Musk whose accounts had been banned Thursday for alleged “doxxing”, but it maintained restrictions on the Twitter account of VOA Chief National Correspondent and JURIST Journalist in Residence Steve Herman.

Account suspensions for journalists from the Washington Post, CNN, the New York Times and several other outlets were removed as Twitter owner Elon Musk announced the results of a spontaneous Twitter poll in which the majority of Twitter users responding to the poll voted that the bans be lifted immediately. In Herman’s case, however, full account access was not restored. Instead, while Twitter removed the “Account suspended” notice from his professional Twitter account @W7VOA, it informed Herman it would only lift his previous “permanent suspension” and restore his account access if he agreed to remove three tweets containing links or information about @ElonJet, a Twitter account carrying public data about the location of Musk’s private jet that Musk had previously banned, insisting that it was revealing personal data about him prohibited under Twitter’s newly-revised Terms of Service.

Herman has appealed Twitter’s proviso and has not agreed to remove the @ElonJet tweets.  In the meantime, on his Mastodon social media site, he has launched his own poll asking Mastodon users whether he should or should not remove the @ElonJet tweets. He has acknowledged in a Mastodon thread that if he doesn’t remove the tweets, “that is effectively leaving Twitter.”

As of this writing, Twitter has not responded to Herman’s appeal.

In solidarity with our JURIST Journalist in Residence, JURIST paused all Twitter operations Friday night pending a review of our Twitter policy and what JURIST has called “the satisfactory resolution of this matter.”