New York
CNN Business
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Newly minted Twitter owner Elon Musk said Friday afternoon that the social media company “will form a content moderation council with very diverse perspectives.” This means that suspended accounts like that of former President Donald Trump will not immediately return to Twitter.
“No major decisions about content or account resets will happen before that council meets,” Musk added.
Following Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter ( TWTR ), questions have been raised about whether the billionaire will lift permanent bans, allowing the likes of Trump to return to the platform. Musk has repeatedly emphasized his intention to rethink Twitter’s content moderation (TWTR) policies.
Musk had previously indicated that he was not a supporter of permanently kicking people out of Twitter and that Trump would be allowed back under his ownership.
By unblocking users and removing content moderation efforts, Musk could make Twitter less welcoming to its most vulnerable users, typically women, members of the LGBTQ community and people of color, according to security experts. It could also roll back the progress Twitter has made in cracking down on accounts and posts that promote abuse, spam and misleading information.
Musk’s commitment to a moderate council should put some of those worries to rest for now. Twitter, however, already has one Trust and Security Council, which consists of a “group of independent expert organizations from around the world” to “advocate for security and advise us as we develop our products, programs and rules.” It is unclear whether Musk was aware of this fact.
Trump has previously said he would remain on his platform, Truth Social, rather than rejoin Twitter, but a change in his approach could have major political implications as the November midterm elections loom and Trump’s shifts his focus to 2024 and his political future.
Throughout Trump’s tenure in the White House, Twitter was central to his presidency, a fact that also benefited the company in the form of countless hours of user engagement. Twitter often took a light-hearted approach to moderating his account, sometimes arguing that as a public official, the then-President should be given broad freedom to speak.
But as Trump neared the end of his term — and he increasingly posted disinformation alleging election fraud — the balance shifted. The company began applying warning labels to his tweets in an effort to correct his misleading claims ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And after the US Capitol riots on January 6, 2021, the platform banned him indefinitely .
But Musk has said he disagrees with Twitter’s permanent ban policy.
“I think it was wrong to ban Donald Trump; I think it was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, vowing to overturn the ban if he became the company’s owner.
Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter’s CEO when the company banned Trump but has since left the company, responded to Musk’s comments by saying he agreed there shouldn’t be permanent bans. The former president’s ban, he said, was a “business decision” and “shouldn’t have been.”
On Thursday, Musk wrote in a note posted to Twitter advertisers that “Twitter obviously cannot become a free-for-all hellscape where anything can be said without consequence! In addition to respecting the laws of the land, our platform must be warm and welcoming to everyone.”
CNN’s Clare Duffy, Brian Fung and Paul LeBlanc contributed to this article
