Elon Musk tempered right-wing enthusiasm on Friday, declaring that he won’t unban any Twitter accounts until a new “content moderation council” is formed.
The committee, he wrote, will be comprised of members with “widely diverse viewpoints.” He added that no other significant content changes will occur for the moment either.
It remains to be seen whether Musk will retain the ability to overrule the committee, and who will be selected to join.
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Musk and his acolytes frequently railed against “censorship” under Twitter’s former leadership; now he is confronting the more challenging task of creating and enforcing new rules.
Having just shelled out $44 billion, the billionaire also faces pressure to keep advertisers from ditching the company.
Musk pledged on Thursday to keep the platform from turning into a “free-for-all hellscape,” indicating that some amount of content moderation would be necessary.
The billionaire had previously promised to remove the ban on Donald Trump’s account; the former president was permanently suspended following the Jan. 6 insurrection “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Other right-wing and fringe users whose accounts have been banned are waiting in the wings, such as Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes, InfoWars provocateur Alex Jones, and potentially soon-to-be-incarcerated former Trump adviser Steve Bannon.
On Friday, misinformation proliferated widely on the platform—demonstrating part of the challenge for Musk—including from right-wing users declaring that their accounts were no longer suppressed, and from media outlets incorrectly stating that Kanye West's account was reactivated. (It was never taken down.)
Soon after closing the transaction on Thursday, Musk tweeted in response to a MAGA-affiliated super-user known as Catturd, pledging to dig into claims the account had been “shadowbanned, ghostbanned, [and] searchbanned.”
Elon Musk.
Anadolu AgencyCatturd celebrated Musk’s ascent on Friday, writing that the “My search ban has been removed.”
Conservative media commentator Ben Shapiro, meanwhile, announced that he had amassed 40,000 new followers in just a few hours on Friday. “Every time Twitter lets the clamps off, my follower count spikes,” he wrote. “That’s not a coincidence.”
Fox News host Dan Bongino added that his follower tally was “jumping.”
Earlier on Friday, a current Twitter employee whose memes have developed a cult following, tweeted a video teasing users—of any political stripe—discussing changes to the platform Musk had supposedly made so quickly.
“They think it’s a new twitter even though [production] is frozen,” he wrote.
Media outlets made their share of mistakes as well. Early afternoon, a CNBC reporter went viral after sharing an image of two young men carrying cardboard boxes who were supposedly fired. She noted that “an entire team of data engineers” had purportedly been let go.
“It’s somewhere I worked at for 6 years and everything suddenly changed,” another CNBC reporter quoted one of them men as saying.
But there were signs the reporters had been pranked. One of the men gave his last name as “Ligma,” an internet-slang variant of “lick my”—the start of a sentence that normally concludes with an anatomical reference.
