San Francisco: New owner Elon Musk asked Twitter users on Wednesday whether the site should offer an amnesty for suspended accounts, using the same method it used to handle Donald Trump’s case.
The move comes after Musk faced pushback that his standards for content moderation were subject to his personal whims, deciding to restore some accounts and not others.
Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
The poll was open as of 17:46 GMT on Thursday and replicated the strategy used a few days earlier for former US President Trump.
“Should Twitter offer amnesty to suspended accounts, provided they haven’t broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” Musk tweeted.
Trump’s Twitter account was reinstated on Saturday after a small majority of respondents supported the move, days after the former US president announced another White House bid.
Reinstate former President Trump
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022
A blanket ruling on the suspended accounts would likely jeopardize government officials who are closely monitoring Musk’s handling of hate speech.
It could also scare Apple and Google, the tech titans that have the power to ban Twitter from their mobile app stores and deny access to the platform to millions of its users.
Trump was barred from the platform early last year for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.
The former president’s reinstatement 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.
The people have spoken.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022
Trump will be reinstated.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei. https://t.co/jmkhFuyfkv
Despite the pleas, Musk said on Sunday that he had “no mercy for anyone who would use the death of children for gain, politics or fame” because of his own experience of seeing his first child die.
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 $44 billion purchase of Twitter in late October, did not specify whether the ban imposed by the poll was a permanent or temporary suspension.
The future of content moderation on Twitter has become an urgent concern, with major advertisers pulling away from the site after a failed relaunch earlier this month saw a proliferation of fake accounts, causing embarrassment.
Meanwhile teams responsible for keeping bad content or nefarious activity off the site have been gutted, hit by layoffs led by Musk that saw half of all employees leave the company.
