Twitter CEO Elon Musk has announced a “general amnesty” for all suspended accounts, opening the door for some of the most controversial figures to return to the platform within days.
In a poll Mr Musk posted to Twitter on Thursday (US time), he asked users whether those who had been banned or suspended but had not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam should be allowed to return.
“Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” Mr Musk wrote.
Of more than 3.16 million users who responded, 72.4 per cent backed welcoming banned users back to the social media platform.
In a move that online safety experts predict will spur a rise in harassment, hate speech, and misinformation, Mr Musk confirmed on Friday he would follow through with the informal poll.
“The people have spoken,” he tweeted. “Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”
Tweet from @elonmusk
The billionaire used the same Latin phrase, which translates to “the voice of the people is the voice of God”, after unbanning former US president Donald Trump last week.
That decision came after another public Twitter poll, in which 51.8 per cent of 15 million votes chose to reinstate Mr Trump’s account.
Such online polls are anything but scientific and can easily be influenced by bots.
The reinstatement of Mr Trump’s Twitter account was the first major moderation decision Mr Musk had made since completing his $US44 billion takeover of Twitter last month.
Mr Trump, who had been banned under the platform’s previous leadership for inciting violence, appeared less than impressed.
“I don’t see any reason for it,” he said when asked whether he planned to return to Twitter.
He said he would stick with his new platform Truth Social, the app developed by his Trump Media & Technology Group startup, which he said had better user engagement than Twitter and was doing “phenomenally well”.
Mr Trump has not so far returned to Twitter, but he has also not deleted his account.
Mr Musk has also reinstated the previously banned accounts of controversial figures Kanye West, Andrew Tate and Jordan Peterson.
In October, he tweeted that Twitter would form a content moderation council “with widely diverse viewpoints” and that no major content decisions or account reinstatements would happen before the council convened.
Mr Musk, who repeatedly tried to get out of buying Twitter amid claims that the platform was filled with bots and inauthentic accounts, has not made it clear which accounts will be allowed back under his latest move.
Hate speech on the rise
In the month since Mr Musk took over Twitter, groups that monitor the platform for racist, anti-Semitic and other toxic speech say it’s been on the rise on the world’s de facto public square.
That has included a surge in racist abuse of World Cup soccer players that Twitter is allegedly failing to act on.
The uptick in harmful content is in large part due to the disorder following Mr Musk’s decision to lay off half the company’s 7500-person workforce, fire top executives, and institute a series of ultimatums that prompted hundreds more to quit.
Contractors responsible for content moderation were also let go.
Among those resigning over a lack of faith in Mr Musk’s willingness to keep Twitter from devolving into a chaos of uncontrolled speech was Twitter’s head of trust and safety, Yoel Roth.
Major advertisers have also abandoned the platform.
This week Mr Musk said he was backtracking on his content moderation pledge because he’d agreed to it at the insistence of “a large coalition of political-social activist groups” who later “broke the deal” by urging advertisers to stop giving Twitter their business.
A report from the European Union published on Thursday said Twitter took longer to review hateful content and removed less of it this year than in 2021.
The report was based on data collected before Mr Musk acquired Twitter as part of an annual evaluation of online platforms’ compliance with the bloc’s code of conduct on disinformation.
It found Twitter assessed just over half of the notifications it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours, down from 82 per cent in 2021.
-with AAP
