New Twitter owner Elon Musk said Thursday that he would begin granting “amnesty” for some previously banned accounts on the social media platform starting next week.
The move marks a reversal from the site’s previous policies regarding content moderation.
“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote on Twitter on Thursday. “Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he added, which translates to “the voice of the people, the voice of God” in Latin.
Musk’s tweet was in response to a poll conducted on Wednesday in which he asked his Twitter followers if the platform should “offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?”
The results of that poll, which closed around 12:45 pm ET on Thursday, showed that 72.4 percent of his followers were in favor of the move, while 27.6 percent were against it.
A total of 3,162,112 votes were cast.
Musk did not provide exact details as to how Twitter would establish which accounts had been suspended for breaking the law or engaging in “egregious spam” and which ones had not.
But there have been some concerns raised, such as those made by Alejandra Caraballo, clinical instructor at Harvard Law’s cyberlaw clinic, in a report by The Washington Post.
“What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous for various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will cause,” said Caraballo.
Trump Twitter Reactivated
The billionaire businessman’s announcement regarding reinstating banned accounts comes shortly after he reactivated former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account following a similar poll in which he asked for users’ opinions on the matter.
Results of that poll showed that 51.8 percent of users wanted to reinstate Trump’s account, while 48.2 percent did not.
Prior to the account reinstatement, Trump had been locked out of the closed-down account, which has over 87 million followers, for nearly two years by Twitter due to an alleged “violation of the glorification of violence policy.”
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