Tech
Twitter to Grant “Amnesty” to Suspended Accounts
Twitter CEO Elon Musk announced Thursday that he is granting “amnesty” to suspended accounts, which alleged experts predict will increase harassment, hate speech, and misinformation.
The billionaire announced after asking for votes on the reinstatement of accounts that have not “broken the law or engaged in egregious spam” in a poll posted to his timeline. The yes vote received 72% of the vote.
“The populace has spoken. The amnesty period begins next week. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk wrote on Twitter, referring to the Latin phrase that means “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
Musk used the same Latin phrase after posting a similar poll last weekend before reinstating former President Donald Trump’s account, which Twitter had banned for encouraging the Capitol insurgency on January 6, 2021. Trump has stated that he will no longer use Twitter but has not deleted his account.
Such online polls are far from scientific and are easily manipulated by bots.
Racist, anti-Semitic, and other toxic speech has been on the rise on the world’s de facto public square in the month since Musk took over Twitter, according to groups that monitor the platform. This has included increased racist abuse directed at World Cup soccer players, which Twitter allegedly fails to address.
The increase in harmful content is largely due to the chaos after Musk decided to lay off half of the company’s 7,500-person workforce, fire top executives, and then issue a series of ultimatums that prompted hundreds more to resign.
A slew of contractors in charge of content moderation was also let go. Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, was among those who resigned due to a lack of trust in Musk’s willingness to keep Twitter from devolving into chaos of uncontrolled speech.
Some advertisers have also withdrawn from Twitter.
Musk tweeted on Oct. 28, the day after assuming control, that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter formed a “content moderation council” with diverse viewpoints to consider the cases.
On Tuesday, he said he was breaking that promise because he agreed to it at the request of “a large coalition of political-social activist groups,” who later “broke the deal” by urging advertisers to at least temporarily stop doing business with Twitter.
A day earlier, Twitter reinstated far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s account, which was suspended in January for violating the platform’s COVID misinformation policies.
Meanwhile, Musk has become increasingly friendly with right-wing figures on Twitter. He urged “independent-minded” Americans to vote Republican ahead of this month’s midterm elections in the United States.
According to a European Union report released Thursday, Twitter took longer to review hateful content this year and removed less of it than in 2021.
The report was based on data collected in the spring — prior to Musk’s acquisition of Twitter — as part of an annual assessment of online platforms’ adherence to the EU’s code of conduct on disinformation. It discovered that Twitter assessed just over half of the illegal hate speech notifications it received within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.
