Elon Musk, the new owner of Twitter, announced Thursday that he will provide “amnesty” to suspended accounts, which internet safety experts fear will lead to an increase in harassment, hate speech, and disinformation.
The billionaire made the announcement after asking for votes on reinstatement of accounts who had 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 people have spoken. Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
Musk used the same Latin phrase after running a similar poll last weekend before reinstating former President Donald Trump‘s account, which Twitter had suspended for supporting the Capitol insurgency on January 6, 2021. Trump has stated that he will no longer use Twitter, although he has not canceled his account.
Such online surveys 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 network.
This has included an increase in racial abuse directed at World Cup soccer players, which Twitter is apparently failing to address.
The increase in damaging content is mostly due to the chaos that ensued after Musk’s decision to lay off half of the company’s 7,500-person workforce, remove top executives, and then issue a series of ultimatums that drove hundreds more to resign. A slew of contractors in charge of content control were also put go.
Yoel Roth, Twitter’s head of trust and safety, was among those who resigned due to a lack of trust in Musk’s resolve to keep Twitter from devolving into a mess of unfettered speech.
Musk tweeted on Oct. 28, the day after assuming control, that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter constituted a “content moderation council” with varied opinions to review the cases.
On Tuesday, he said he was breaking that commitment because he committed to it at the request of “a large coalition of political-social activist groups,” who afterwards “broke the deal” by asking advertisers to at least temporarily stop doing business with Twitter.
A day earlier, Twitter reinstated far-right Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account, which had been suspended in January for breaching the platform’s COVID misinformation standards.
Meanwhile, Musk has become increasingly friendly with right-wing individuals 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 assessment released on Thursday, Twitter took longer to examine abusive content this year and eliminated less of it than in 2021.
The analysis was based on data obtained 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 against disinformation.
It discovered that Twitter examined just over half of the illegal hate speech warnings it received within 24 hours, down from 82% in 2021.
