Twitter unbans Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson and Kathy Griffin, as Musk sets 'freedom of reach' policy
'Hate tweets will be max deboosted & demonetized' says Elon Musk without much context
➡️ The Shortcut Skinny: Twitter ban reversals
🚫 Twitter unbans some, but not all controversial accounts
🫂 The Babylon Bee, Jordan Peterson and Kathy Griffin can now post again
📝 Elon Musk laid out a ‘freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach’ policy
🗳️ No decision made about Donald Trump, but Musk is running a poll
🙅♂️ Reinstating Alex Jones’ account is a ‘No,' says Musk
Update at 9:15pm ET: Elon Musk has replied “No” to a user asking that he’ll unban Alex Jones, but he is running a poll on whether or not to reinstate the account of former US President Donald Trump. Unsupsringly, the results are close.
Who’s in, who’s out, who’s in limbo
Twitter is adding to its daily active users today by unbanning the controversial accounts of the satirical news website The Babylon Bee, Canadian author Jordan Peterson and comedian Kathy Griffin (she hasn’t posted yet).
However, not everyone is back. “Trump decision has not yet been made,” said Twitter owner Elon Musk, but the Space X founder is running a poll asking users of the social media platform if the account of the former US President should be reinstated.
Someone not coming back to Twitter is Alex Jones. Musk was asked by one user if Jones would be unbanned from the platform, and he replied bluntly: “No.” When another user followed up calling it a litmus test, Musk responded “Too bad.”
Freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach
This is part of Musk’s new Twitter policy that proposes “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach” and it backs up his promise to make Twitter the digital town square with less censorship. But, at the same time, he noted without much context that “negative” and “hate” tweets will be deboosted and demonetized. No ads will be seen or other revenue will be gained by Twitter on such tweets.
Musk said that this deboosting policy applies to individual tweets and “not the whole account” meaning we should be safe from account-wide shadow-banning theories. But the limit of 280 characters per tweet means we’re short on details. Musk hasn’t said how Twitter will determine which comments fall under the negative or hateful umbrella – will it be based on the number of user reports? An algorithm? Or the fraction of employees left at Twitter?
If Musk lives up to his other promise to open source the Twitter algorithm, we may find out this information – eventually. First, on his agenda is to fix the $8 Twitter Blue subscription, which is set to relaunch on November 29.
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