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 aspirations.”

Early Saturday, some some of those accounts had returned, but others appeared to remain locked until the offending tweet was deleted.

“I don’t know why I was suspended,” Linette Lopez of Business Insider told The Post on Friday, “and I haven’t heard anything from Twitter.” Lopez noted that she had not written or tweeted about the controversy over Musk’s flight data but that she had shared court documents pointing out how Musk had harassed critics and revealed personal information about them in the past. Her account was still suspended early Saturday.

Freedom of speech has been a rallying cry for Musk, the billionaire owner of Tesla and SpaceX, since he first moved earlier this year to purchase Twitter and subsequently made a point of undoing many of the company’s previous policies against hate speech and misinformation, rolling back a nearly two-year ban of former president Donald Trump.

But even in conservative-leaning media, where Musk has been roundly praised for reinstating Trump and other right-wing accounts, the suspensions were not uniformly praised.

On Friday morning, some of the hosts of the conservative Fox News talk show “Fox & Friends” expressed bafflement. “This is crazy,” said co-host Brian Kilmeade. “If they were just being critical of [Musk], he’s got to explain why those people were suspended,” said co-host Steve Doocy.

Ben Shapiro, founding editor in chief of the Daily Wire, admitted to some “schadenfreude” about journalists complaining about the move “given their enthusiasm for opaque Twitter censorship” — but seemed to take issue with Musk’s argument that the suspended journalists had actually “doxed” his location. Fox News personality and radio host Dan Bongino said on his show that he…