CAPE CANAVERAL:After a massive majority of users responded favorably to an informal poll conducted by the new owner, Elon Musk announced on Thursday that numerous previously suspended Twitter accounts would be reinstated on the platform.
The news comes as Musk faces criticism for claiming that he decides which accounts will be reinstated based on his own criteria for content moderation.
"The majority has spoken.In response to the poll, Musk tweeted, "Amnesty begins next week."
He continued by saying, "Vox Populi, Vox Dei," repeating a Latin proverb that translates to "The voice of the people is the voice of God" and which he had previously used to discuss other Twitter polls.
According to Musk's post, 72.4 percent of the 3.16 million people who answered the poll question on Wednesday said that Twitter should allow suspended accounts to return to the platform so long as they have not violated any laws or engaged in "egregious spam."
Musk used a similar informal "yes/no" poll of Twitter users to decide whether or not to reinstate former president Donald Trump on the platform.
Trump's Twitter account was restored Saturday after a thin larger part of respondents upheld the move.
Surveys on Twitter are available to all clients and are informal and possibly designated by counterfeit records and bots.
In addition, despite the fact that Musk has 118 million followers, many of Twitter's 450 million monthly active users may not have seen the poll question.
Since Musk purchased the influential platform for $44 billion, authorities in the government are keeping a close eye on how he handles hate speech. A blanket amnesty for suspended accounts could alarm them.
It could also frighten tech giants Apple and Google, which have the authority to remove Twitter from their app stores for content-related reasons.
Due to his involvement in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to overturn the 2020 election results, Trump was barred from the platform early last year.
Musk reinstated Trump following the reinstatement of other banned accounts, including a conservative parody website and a psychologist who had broken Twitter's rules regarding language that identified transgender individuals.
Alex Jones, a conspiracy theorist, has been banned from Twitter and will not be returning, according to Tesla and SpaceX CEOs.
Due to his own experience with the death of his first child, Musk declared on Sunday that he had "no mercy for anyone who would use the deaths of children for gain, politics, or fame."
For lying about the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School, in which 26 people, mostly children, died, Jones has been ordered to pay hundreds of millions of dollars in damages.
In closing his Twitter buyout at the end of October, Musk did not specify whether the poll's bans would be permanent or temporary.
After a failed relaunch earlier this month that saw a proliferation of fake accounts, which caused embarrassment, the future of content moderation on Twitter has become an urgent concern. As a result, major advertisers have stopped using the site.
As a result of layoffs led by Musk, which resulted in the departure of half of the company's employees, the teams in charge of preventing criminal activity from taking place on the site have been decimated.
Northeastern University media professor John Wihbey suggested that Musk might be trying to "buy himself time" by creating all the chaos.
According to Wihbey, "a lot of what he's doing is trying to frame those fights." Regulators "are certainly going to come after him, both in Europe and maybe the United States."
