The new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, keeps making controversial changes to the platform he now runs, the latest being the introduction of a general amnesty that will result in many banned accounts coming back from their grave.
The decision came following a poll Musk conducted on Twitter a couple of days ago that asked the public if they agreed with this measure. Nearly 3.2 million people responded to Musk’s survey and the majority of them – 72.4% to be precise – said “yes”.
Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
In response, Musk once again used the Latin phrase “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, which means “the people’s voice is the voice of God”. The head of Tesla (TSLA) emphasized that the amnesty will commence next week and that it will apply to all suspended accounts so long they have not broken the law or been flagged for spamming.
The decision came only days after Musk officially reinstated the account of former US President Donald Trump after he spent two weeks in what platform users call “Twitter jail” following multiple controversial remarks about conspiracy theories and inaccurate COVID-19 comments.
Fake News on Twitter Spread Like Wildfire
Before Musk took the reins, Twitter was actively enforcing its safety rules to avoid the spread of comments and information that promoted violent behaviors, terrorism, abuse, racism, and suicide, among other topics considered harmful to the platform’s global community.
However, this latest decision from the founder of SpaceX puts into question how the firm will address these topics and how it will actively moderate the platform’s content. In addition, Twitter recently laid off over 5,000 independent contractors, many of which were content moderators.
Advertisers have been staying on the sidelines or have opted to leave Twitter altogether shortly after Musk started to make these controversial decisions as they fear that the platform could become a place plagued by misinformation and hate speech.
A study performed by scholars from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) years ago indicated that fake news within Twitter spread 10 times faster than true reports. They also found that, somehow shockingly, bots were not responsible for this phenomenon.
Musk attempted to address these concerns yesterday by publishing a graph that showed how hate speech impressions have behaved since October this year. At some point in early November, this kind of content experienced a spike with more than 10 million impressions being identified by Twitter’s developing team. However, the chart depicted a huge drop since then with the figure now standing somewhere around 3 million per day.
Musk attributed this drop to an action taken by Twitter that involved limiting the number of tweets that a user could publish per day to a number “below what a speed typist on meth could do”.
The methodology used to identify this type of content or other similar information was not disclosed by the billionaire at the time. The fact that he addressed the issue could indicate that it remains a heated topic of discussion and a reason for advertisers to abstain from running their ad campaigns on the platform.
Can Musk’s Actions Translate into Better Financial Performance?
Musk has been quite busy ever since he took over Twitter. His first order of business was the rollout of a new version of the platform’s premium subscription package “Blue”. The price of the subscription was raised to $8 per month and Musk attempted to encourage users to sign up by allowing them to apply for verified status.
This resulted in chaos within the platform as many users were able to verify accounts that impersonated celebrities or prominent organizations. Twitter was forced to introduce an “Official” label for accounts that have been carefully vetted by the company.
Alongside this measure, Musk laid off nearly half of Twitter’s staff including hundreds of engineers while several top executives within the firm decided to step down from their roles.
Now that Twitter is a private entity, it will no longer be required to disclose its finances to the public. Hence, it would be difficult to assert if Musk’s measures will eventually result in an improvement in the company’s top and bottom-line performance.
In any case, the pressure is on Musk’s side to make Twitter a more profitable endeavor as he took a significant amount of debt to financing the takeover that will now be carried on the company’s balance sheet.
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