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Twitter has suspended the accounts of a prominent Tesla and Elon Musk critic, PlainSite founder Aaron Greenspan [1]

['Lora Kolodny']

Date: 2023-06-15

Twitter suspended the accounts of PlainSite and its founder Aaron Greenspan, a prolific Tesla and Elon Musk critic, Tuesday afternoon.

PlainSite is an online database that makes state and federal court filings and other public records available to users for free. The site also offers analytics features to paying subscribers, meant to help lawyers and pro-se litigants gain insights about attorneys, judges, government offices and the law.

Greenspan has meticulously tracked litigation by or against companies mostly in the U.S., including Tesla, Twitter — which Musk took private in an acquisition last year — as well as competitors GM , Meta and a myriad of others. He and Musk have also been involved in litigation over the years.

At the time PlainSite's account was suspended, it boasted more than 24,000 listed followers on Twitter. Greenspan's personal account had about 2,500 followers.

The suspension stands at odds with public statements from Twitter's executive chairman and CTO Elon Musk, and newly appointed CEO Linda Yaccarino. Yaccarino was previously global advertising chief at NBCUniversal, the parent company of CNBC.

In April 2022, after Musk announced his intention to acquire Twitter, he wrote in a tweet, "I hope that even my worst critics remain on Twitter, because that is what free speech means."

More recently, Yaccarino wrote in a company-wide memo that a healthy civilization needs an "unfiltered exchange of information and open dialogue about the things that matter most to us." She also said in the memo, "You should have the freedom to speak your mind. We all should."

Greenspan told CNBC on Thursday that he has not yet received information from Twitter saying why the company suspended his accounts, though he has requested a reinstatement of both.

He also discussed some of the reasons why he started the "legal transparency initiative" PlainSite, and how he came to be regarded as an Elon Musk nemesis.

"I created PlainSite with two friends in 2011, because we were all wondering why Occupy Wall Street didn't have the impact we expected," he reminisced. "No financial execs went to jail for the 2008 financial crisis though it really was obvious there had been criminal wrongdoing somewhere. One reason, we thought, was that people didn't understand what the law said and what are the loopholes banks or execs were able to exploit to get out of being held accountable."

Over the years, Greenspan has shorted stock in some of the companies he has researched and written about on PlainSite, disclosing those positions when he held them. He is not short Tesla today, but he has been in the past, he said.

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[1] Url: https://www.cnbc.com/2023/06/15/elon-musk-led-twitter-suspended-plainsite-a-prominent-tesla-critic.html

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