Before Elon Musk had reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account, he had put up a poll for his followers, asking should the former US President’s ban from the platform be reversed. Now, Musk has put up a similar poll asking if nearly all accounts and profiles that have been banned on the platform in the past, should be given general amnesty and allowed back on the platform.
This means that figures like Kangana Ranaut and Kamaal R Khan may finally get their Twitter accounts back.
On Wednesday, he asked: “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” He gave his followers 24 hours to vote, and so far, people have overwhelmingly voted “yes.”
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
Donald Trump isn’t the only one who got their bans overturned. Rapper Ye, and Professor Jordan Peterson, two highly controversial figures have also had their bans or suspensions lifted.
Shortly after taking ownership of Twitter, Musk said that Twitter would set up a council to make decisions on who should be allowed back onto the platform. That idea has since been binned, and it seems that Musk is now willing to make sweeping changes based largely on his own opinion.
In the poll that Musk out up or any of the subsequent tweets, he doesn’t share the details on when this change will happen, if his followers vote yes. And although several brands and users may be concerned about having certain “bad actors” back on the platform, it theoretically shouldn’t matter, at least as per Musk’s vision for the platform,
Musk has said before that he wants negative and hate tweets to basically be invisible unless a user specifically tries to seek them out. To achieve this, Twitter will still need a bunch of content moderators and robust moderation system, that will enable them to report those accounts. However, Twitter’s content moderation has been hit hard by the firing of both, moderators who were on Twitter’s payroll, and those who were contracted agents.
There’s a silver lining in all of this though. Even though people may fear that Twitter will be filled with very controversial figures who would spew nothing but venom on the platform, Musk has an idea of where he would draw the line. For example, he would never let anyone like Alex Jones, a controversial conspiracy theorist who has accused the victims of mass shootings in the US to be paid actors, to be reinstated for mongering clearly false rumours.
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