Elon Musk said on Nov. 2 that suspended Twitter users won’t be able to return for several weeks, coming months after he expressed a desire to allow former President Donald Trump back on the platform.
“Twitter’s content moderation council will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence,” he wrote early Nov. 2.
Hours ahead of Musk’s Twitter acquisition, the world’s richest person sent a letter to advertisers that he won’t allow the platform to become a “free-for-all hellscape.”
As Musk met with some of those groups he mentioned, top officials in the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press, and others criticized him.
“When the world’s richest man/owner of this very site himself traffics in conspiracy theories days after claiming to advertisers that he’s going to be a responsible leader, all I can say is: I’m not overreacting by expressing my concerns. Actions always speak louder than words,” wrote Yael Eisenstat, vice president at the Anti-Defamation League, who later met with Musk.
Before purchasing Twitter for $44 billion last week, Musk said he would roll back some of the social media website’s content moderation policies and accused those rules of favoring left-wing users. He also said he would restore former President Donald Trump’s account, which was banned in January 2021 as Twitter officials publicly linked him to the U.S. Capitol breach on Jan. 6, 2021.
Earlier this year, Trump said he won’t return to Twitter and that he favors Truth Social, his own platform that’s a competitor to Twitter. For years, Trump’s account drove huge engagement on Twitter and often shaped news cycles for days—or weeks—at a time.
