Monitoring Desk
ISLAMABAD/WASHINGTON: Elon Musk’s Twitter has reinstated thousands of once-banned accounts including the accounts of conspiracy theorists who earlier urged Americans to burn voting machines and an anti-Muslim activist posting a photo with a gun.
According to the AFP, Twitter has turned into what campaigners call a cesspool of misinformation and hate-filled conspiracies amid what appeared to be reduced content moderation in the recent weeks following mass layoffs and the exodus of key staff focused on user safety.
Musk made a self-proclaimed free speech absolutist who completed his $44 billion buyout of the influential platform in October, further stoked alarm by restoring what one expert estimated over 27,000 accounts once suspended for fueling falsehoods and harassment.
Twitter amnesty
“Restoring these accounts could make the platform a magnet for actors who want to spread misinformation,” said Jonathan Nagler, co-director of the New York University’s Centre for Social Media and Politics.
“And there will likely be less hate speech moderation, making the platform less hospitable to many users.”
Those reinstated accounts included far-right activists, anti-Muslim extremists, and others peddling election conspiracies and Covid misinformation, according to the analysis by the non-profit Media Matters with dozens of the restored accounts with millions of combined followers.
Among those allowed back is ex-US President Donald Trump, whose Twitter account was “permanently” banned after his supporters stormed US Capitol building on January 6, 2021.
Trump has so far resisted the offer and remained on Truth Social, a platform he founded where his following paled as compared to his Twitter account with 87.7 million followers.
Serval other reinstated influencers have actively returned to a platform, including flamboyant anti-Muslim activist Pamela Geller and Mindy Robinson, a supporter of the QAnon conspiracy movement whose first tweet after being restored included a picture of herself with a gun.
The reinstated accounts included controversial former kickboxer Andrew Tate, who is alleged to have made misogynistic remarks. After a heated Twitter exchange with the environmentalist Greta Thunberg, Tate was recently arrested in Romania for alleged human trafficking.
After thanking Elon for restoring his account, election conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell called on his followers to “meltdown electronic voting machines and turn them into prison bars.”
Michael Flynn, former national security adviser, who once appeared to endorse the idea of a Myanmar-style coup in the United States, also thanked Musk on Friday, on the second anniversary of the January 6 insurrection after his account was restored.
Jack Brewster said that under Elon, misinformation super spreaders have emboldened, and readers have less information about the reliability of the sources feeding them news and information.
Elon’s interventions, he said, had the effect of catering to the extreme on both sides of the aisle and obscuring readers’ path to high-quality information.
Twitter has not publicly said how many accounts have been reinstated. AFP/APP
