‘No banned Twitter account restoration before…’: What Elon Musk said

“Twitter will be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”, Elon Musk wrote on Twitter.

New owner Elon Musk on Friday announced he would form a “content moderation council” at Twitter to assess future policy on posting and on reinstating banned accounts.

Flooded with requests from banned accounts

According to a report on Reuters, billionaire Elon Musk has been flooded with demands and requests by fake and banned account owners and world leaders.

The flood of requests underscore the challenge Elon Musk faces- balancing a promise to restore free speech while preventing the platform from descending into a “hellscape,” as he had vowed in an open letter to advertisers on Thursday.

Former US President Donald Trump, who was permanently banned from Twitter over accusations of inciting violence after the 6 January, 2021 capitol riots, welcomed the takeover, but said little about a return to Twitter. “I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs who truly hate our country.”

Others asked Musk to reverse penalties inflicted by the social media platform. In response to @catturd2, an anonymous account with 852,000 followers, known for being a big supporter of Trump’s election fraud claims, and who said it was “shadowbanned,” Musk tweeted “I will be digging in more today.”

Will this reduce the ‘fake account’ problem?

Twitter’s unending fight against spam accounts is now a problem for new owner Elon Musk, who pledged in April to defeat the bot scourge or “die trying!”

He later cited bots as a reason to back out of buying the social platform. Now that the billionaire has completed the deal, he’s faced with the task of delivering on his promise to clean up the fake profiles that have preoccupied him and bedeviled Twitter since long before he expressed interest in acquiring it.

“The bigger picture in my mind is: How do we make Twitter a better place for everybody,” said bot-counting expert Emilio Ferrara, who worked over the summer to investigate the problem for Musk. He cited the “value of the platform as a societal experience, as a collective place to have civilized discourse and talk freely without interference from nefarious accounts,” or scams, spam, pornography and harassment.