Musk wants to reinstate more suspended accounts on Twitter

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk has hinted that the microblogging platform might restore more suspended accounts that have not broken any laws. In a Twitter post, Musk asked his followers, “Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?”

“The more I learn, the worse it gets. The world should know the truth about what has been happening on Twitter. Transparency will earn the trust of the people,” he added in the second post. 

Last week, the Twitter account of former US president Donald Trump was reinstated after a similar Twitter poll conducted by Musk. Trump was permanently banned from multiple social media networks including Twitter in January 2021 for making allegedly inflammatory comments before the Capitol Hill attack in which thousands of rioters stormed the US parliament. 

Musk has been a vocal advocate of free speech on social media platforms and has argued in several of his Twitter posts that failing to adhere to free speech principles undermines democracy. 

Musk took over Twitter last month after a $44 billion deal and announced plans to make sweeping changes in the platform. The company board of directors was dissolved and top executives including CEO Parag Agrawal were fired within the first week of taking control. This was followed by mass layoffs impacting half of the company’s workforce and thousands of contractual workers. 

Twitter under Musk has suspended microservices on the platform and is planning to drop the 280-character limit. The premium Twitter Blue feature is also being revamped and set to launch on November 29. 

Several Twitter users have announced plans to shift to other microblogging platforms such as Mastodon and Hive Social. Several brands have also suspended advertising, which reportedly accounts for 80% of the platform’s revenue. 

Musk has accused Twitter’s former leadership of misleading him about the accurate number of bots and spam accounts on the microblogging platform. Before the acquisition, Twitter said that the number of bot accounts was under 5% of the platform’s monetizable users. Musk has maintained the actual number of bots is four to five times more.