Elon Musk may be poised to reinstate scads of previously banned Twitter accounts.
“Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” he asked in a Twitter poll.
A majority of the votes so far have been cast in favor of the business tycoon’s mass account amnesty proposal.
Since taking over the social media company, Musk has already reinstated some accounts.
He restored former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account after running a poll in which a majority of the votes supported reinstatement. “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, using Latin that means “the voice of the people (is) the voice of God.”
Earlier this year, Musk said that if he owned Twitter he would reinstate Trump — Musk described the move to kick Trump off of the platform as “morally wrong and flat-out stupid.” Trump was booted from the platform last year near the end of his White House tenure.
Musk has also already reinstated the personal account of Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia — that account had been permanently suspended in January.
In October, Musk tweeted, “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.” But on Tuesday, he wrote that “a large coalition of political/social activist groups agreed not to try to kill Twitter by starving us of advertising revenue if I agreed to this condition. They broke the deal.”
Musk has agreed with conservative filmmaker and author Dinesh D’Souza that Twitter censorship has been targeting conservatives, but not leftists.
“We don’t hear much about Democrats and leftists being let back on Twitter. Why? Because they were never kicked off in the first place. Their lies and misinformation simply escaped all scrutiny. Censorship has been deployed as a one-way operation against conservatives,” D’Souza tweeted on Monday, tagging Musk.
“Correct,” Musk replied on Tuesday.