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Elon Musk plans to reinstate almost all previously banned Twitter accounts, alarming campaigners and experts in online safety and trust.
After posting a poll on Twitter asking: “Should Twitter offer a blanket amnesty to suspended accounts, as long as they haven’t broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?” in which 72.4 percent of respondents voted yes, Musk declared, “Amnesty starts next week.”
The Twitter CEO did not respond to a request for comment from The Post on Thursday. The poll garnered more than 3 million votes.
According to experts, the mass return of users who had been banned for crimes such as violent threats, harassment, abuse and misinformation would have a significant impact on the platform. And many questioned how this resurrection would be handled, given that it’s unclear what Musk means by “blatant spam” and the difficulty of singling out users who have “broken the law,” which varies widely by jurisdiction and country.
“Apple and Google need to start seriously exploring booting Twitter from the app store,” said Alejandra Caraballo, a clinical instructor at the Harvard Law Cyberlaw Clinic. “What Musk is doing is existentially dangerous to various marginalized communities. It’s like opening the gates of hell in terms of the havoc it will wreak. People who engaged in direct targeted harassment can go back and engage in doxxing, targeted harassment, brutal harassment, calls for violence and celebration of violence. I can’t even begin to say how dangerous this is going to be.”
Musk’s “free speech” agenda is dismantling security work at Twitter, experts say
This is the second time in a week that Musk has used a Twitter poll to apparently make a major decision related to the platform. On Nov. 18, he restored former President Donald Trump’s account after 52 percent of respondents to a poll said he should. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
That day, he also unilaterally reinstated at least 11 high-profile far-right Twitter accounts, including Jordan Peterson, a professor who was kicked off Twitter for trolling a trans person, and Babylon Bee, a conservative media company. He also restored Project Veritas, a site often accused of misrepresenting events it commented on and banned “for repeated violations of Twitter’s privacy policy,” and MP Marjorie Taylor-Greene’s personal account, which was banned since January to violate covid-19 disinformation policies and promoting violent and extreme rhetoric.
Experts say that bots and bad actors can easily skew the results of a Twitter poll, so basing decisions on one is irresponsible. “A Twitter poll can be manipulated, there’s nothing scientific or rigorous in any way about what it’s doing,” said Sarah T. Roberts, an associate professor at UCLA and faculty director of the Center for Critical Inquiry at UCLA. UCLA Internet, who previously worked at Twitter doing research. content moderation processes.
“Before Elon took over,” Roberts added, “there were entire teams of people doing market and user research, following rigorous established protocols for doing that kind of research. All of a sudden, you’re doing serve Twitter off completely unscientific polls that are polling unknown people and certainly not any sort of demographically representative group of people.”
Many predicted that reinstating banned accounts would backfire and help create the “free-for-all hellscape” that Musk had promised advertisers would not be fulfilled in a letter posted on Twitter the day he took over the platform. .
“This would be a huge disaster, especially in Africa, where state-sponsored Ghost accounts were suspended for endangering human rights activists and journalists,” tweeted Hopewell Chin’ono, a journalist at the Africa “You would have allowed vile people to endanger our lives as journalists! You will have blood on your hands @elonmusk.
Twitter king Dril on Musk’s chaotic reign
Whether Musk can do what the Twitter poll is looking for is up for debate. He has fired the leaders of the trust and security team, who would normally handle the logistics of reactivating accounts. And singling out those who “broke the law” depends entirely on whether Twitter has detailed documentation for each suspension that includes which local laws the tweet violated. Without this legal filter, which would depend on state and local laws for each tweet, each account would require detailed review. Laws also vary greatly by country and region.
Madeleine Burkholder, a senior technical solutions engineer who has worked on consumer products to manage spam, said Musk’s question makes no sense. “Notorious spam is not a technical term,” he said, and most major tech companies’ records don’t include questions about local government legal codes. The rule is simply to point out whether an account violated a company’s terms of service, which are rules set by the platform, not any kind of law.
“It gets really hairy to pull those threads apart and figure out what exactly was the behavior that led to his suspension,” Burkholder said. “Was it an innocent mistake? Was it malicious? How malicious was it? … Doing it in one case is a challenge, trying to do it for all accounts, you’re bound to make mistakes.”
Angelo Carusone, chairman and president of Media Matters, a nonprofit advocacy and media watchdog group, said Musk’s reinstatement of suspended accounts could mean bringing back networks of individuals that include the American Nazi Party and ” a bunch of 8chan, 4chan, and 4chan conspiracy theorists.” who engage in harassment and abuse.” 8chan and 4chan are two message boards known for their racist and anti-Semitic posts.
Reversing the suspensions would mean “turning Twitter into a one-stop shop for doxxing and harassment, and an engine of radicalization,” Carusone said. “It’s a red Pez pill dispenser.” And quitting Twitter won’t keep you safe. “Even if you’re not on Twitter, you can be the recipient of these campaigns,” he said. He predicted that public health officials, election officials, journalists and teachers will be targeted.
“Making major moderation and enforcement decisions on a whim is troubling CEO behavior,” said Nora Benavidez, senior counsel and director of digital justice and civil rights at Free Press, a nonprofit advocacy group. “Musk, under the auspices of democracy, is legitimizing decisions that will have deeply dangerous consequences in the real world.”
Benavidez said organizations such as the Free Press have spent years educating tech giants about complex issues of trust and security and “pressing them to understand the really delicate and complex role they play in mitigating harm to real people.” . If “blanket amnesty” is granted for most suspended accounts, “it will be open to people suspended for hate, harassment, misinformation, conspiracies and extremism,” Benavidez said. “It’s open season in the most dangerous ways.”
“You have journalists, activists in authoritarian regimes in Africa, the Middle East and Asia who are now at the mercy of even more vicious trolls with no ability to fight back,” Caraballo said. “It’s literally life or death for people.”
Advertisers are letting Twitter go. Musk can’t afford to lose any more.
The lifting of the suspensions was of particular concern to LGBTQ activists, coming just days after a mass shooting at the Q Club in Colorado Springs killed five and injured 18. Several of the reinstated accounts had previously been suspended for rhetoric of hatred towards the gay and trans community. , and Musk has come under fire for responding to Tim Pool, a right-wing YouTube star who falsely claimed the club hosted a “grooming event,” and other anti-LGBTQ accounts.
“It’s a slap in the face to LGBTQ people,” Caraballo said.
In the days after taking over Twitter, Musk initially promised not to change the site’s moderation policies and restore accounts until he appointed a moderation board. But more recently, Musk has backtracked on appointing that board and fired hundreds of Twitter employees whose job it was to monitor posts on the site.
Dozens of Twitter advertisers have halted spending on the platform in the wake of Musk’s acquisition, worried about how his approach to content moderation could affect the tone of the site.