San Francisco: Elon Musk said on Thursday that many were previously suspended. Twitter Accounts will be allowed back on the platform after users who responded to an informal poll by the new owner voted in favor of the move.
The announcement comes as Musk faces pushback that his content moderation standards are subject to his personal whims, deciding to restore some accounts and not others.
“The people have spoken. Amnesty starts next week,” Musk tweeted in response to the poll.
“Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he added, repeating a Latin saying that means “the voice of the people is the voice of God,” which he has used when talking about other Twitter polls.
Of the 3.16 million respondents to Musk’s poll question on Wednesday, 72.4% said Twitter should allow the suspension. Accounts As long as they haven’t broken the rules or engaged in “too much spam,” Musk posted, return to Twitter.
It was the same type of informal “yes/no” poll of Twitter users that Musk devised to decide whether to reinstate former President Donald Trump on the platform.
Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated on Saturday after a narrow majority of respondents supported the move.
Polls on Twitter are open to all users and are targeted by unscientific and possibly fake accounts and bots.
Additionally, while Musk has 118 million followers, many of Twitter’s 450 million monthly active users may have never seen the poll question.
An amnesty for suspended accounts could potentially jeopardize government officials who have been closely monitoring Musk’s crackdown on hate speech since he bought the influential platform for $44 billion.
It could also scare Apple and Google, the tech titans that have the power to ban Twitter from their mobile app stores over content concerns.
Trump was banned from the platform early last year for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
‘No Mercy’
Trump’s reinstatement of Musk followed other banned accounts including a conservative parody site and a psychologist who violated Twitter’s rules on transgender-identifying language.
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones will not return to Twitter and will remain banned from the platform, the CEOs of Tesla and SpaceX have said.
Musk said on Sunday that because of his own experience with the death of his first child, he would have “no mercy for anyone who would use the death of a child for gain, politics or fame”.
Jones has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages for lying about the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting that killed 26 people, mostly children.
Musk, who closed the Twitter purchase in late October, did not specify whether the bans lifted by the poll were a permanent suspension or a temporary one.
The future of content moderation on Twitter has become a matter of immediate concern, after a failed relaunch earlier this month saw major advertisers stay off the site that led to a proliferation of fake accounts, causing embarrassment.
Meanwhile, teams in charge of keeping nefarious activity off the site have been decimated, suffering layoffs led by Musk that saw half of all employees leave the company.
John Wiebe, a media professor at Northeastern University, speculated that all the chaos may be because Musk is trying to “buy himself time.”
“Regulators are certainly going to come after him, both in Europe and probably in the US… and so what he’s doing is trying to arrange these fights,” Wehbe said.