Several high-profile journalists who were suspended from Twitter on Thursday evening were reinstated early Saturday, NBC News reported.
According to NBC News, Twitter users voted in a poll posted by Musk to reinstate the accounts, which were cut off without warning. The social media platform’s new owner has recently used Twitter polls for several high-profile decisions including reinstatement of former President Donald Trump’s account.
The most recent Twitter poll that Elon Musk tweeted was titled: “Unsuspend accounts who doxxed my exact location in real-time” The choices included “Now” and “In 7 days”. The final vote showed that 58.7% of those who participated in the poll voted for “Now”, while 41.3% of those participating voted for “In 7 days”.
NBC News reported that Musk had vowed to run Twitter as a free speech absolutist, and since taking control has reinstated accounts associated with the QAnon movement and other far-right groups but banned others.
The Guardian reported that after the initial poll supported an immediate reversal of the bans on Thursday, Musk said there were too many options, and ran another poll for 24 hours with just two options: to keep the ban in place for seven days, or lift the ban immediately.
According to The Guardian, the suspension of the accounts of reporters who cover Musk was widely condemned by their employees, other media organizations, the EU and the United Nations.
In addition, after entering a Spaces conversation run by BuzzFeed News tech reporter Katie Notopoulos, Musk left the event, and not long after the Space abruptly ended and was then deleted entirely by Twitter.
The Guardian also reported that Twitter took the entire Spaces product offline for almost a day, with Musk saying a “legacy bug” needed to be fixed. After it returned, Notopoulos found she had been banned from Spaces.
The Verge reported that journalists from a variety of outlets, including The New York Times, CNN, NBC, The Intercept, and more had their accounts suspended on Thursday, most of them after tweeting about @ElonJet, a Twitter account that tracked the SpaceX-owned private jet Elon Musk users, based on publicly available FAA flight tracking data.
According to The Verge, on Friday evening, the Twitter Safety account tweeted that the company had “identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules” and that it would be reinstating accounts on a weekly basis over the next 30 days. It’s unclear if the tweet was an announcement regarding Musk’s general amnesty poll, or the people banned based on the new live tracking policy.
Personally, I don’t think any social media platform should make decisions based on polls that are haphazardly posted by the CEO at random moments. Things have become more chaotic than usual on Twitter since Mr. Musk took it over.