Musk reinstates reporters on Twitter. Their companies, though, never left.

But without exception, these media organizations kept on tweeting at their usual busy paces Thursday night and into Friday — using their own official accounts to promote their latest stories.

Musk justified the suspensions by accusing the reporters of posting “basically assassination coordinates” for him and his family — a reference, apparently, to their reporting and tweets about Twitter’s decision to suspend an account, @ElonJet, that had been using public flight data to share the location of Musk’s private plane.

The Post could find no evidence that the reporters in question had shared information about Musk or his family’s location.

Early Saturday, after an informal Twitter poll by Musk, he said suspensions would be lifted immediately for “accounts who doxxed my location,” and several reporters’ accounts reappeared. Still, the reaction epitomized the conflicted, and seemingly codependent, relationship between the news media and social media.

In the 15 years since sites like Twitter and Facebook exploded in popularity, traditional news outlets have resolved to see them as much of an opportunity as a threat — potent new vectors for delivering the news directly to the screens of avid readers. Publishers have invested heavily in staff whose primary role is to fine-tune and promote stories over social media; editors prize journalists who have amassed tens of thousands of Twitter followers for the traffic they can bring to their sites.

Some managers have started to question whether Twitter traffic is actually worth the effort. Yet the modest response Friday to a maneuver that drew widespread rebukes from free-speech advocates — as well as from the European Commission, United Nations and members of Congress — suggest that they won’t be quitting it soon.

“How [else] are they going to get the word out? Sadly, Twitter is still the only real game in town,” said Vivian Schiller, a former president of NPR who also served as Twitter’s head of news in 2014. “Don’t get me wrong, Musk is a thin-skinned erratic hypocrite, but he’s got us over a barrel,” she added, until another social media platform comes along to rival it.

At least nine journalists, including Washington Post technology reporter Drew Harwell and New York Times journalist Ryan Mac, were hit with the suspensions, which the American Civil Liberties Union said were “impossible to square with Twitter’s free speech…