Banned users won’t be back on Twitter before midterms, Elon Musk says

Banned users won’t be back on Twitter ‘for weeks,’ Elon Musk has said, meaning that former President Donald Trump and other users blocked from the platform won’t be back before the midterm elections on 8 November. The Tesla CEO finished his $44bn purchase of the social media platform last week after failing to back out of the deal. ‘Twitter will not allow anyone who was de-platformed for violating Twitter rules back on [the] platform until we have a clear process for doing so, which will take at least a few more weeks,’ Mr Musk tweeted on Wednesday. He said he was creating a council to oversee content moderation and which will guide how the platform will enforce bans going ahead. Mr Musk’s announcement was in reply to a post by the head of safety and integrity at the platform, saying that Twitter was ‘staying vigilant against attempts to manipulate conversations’ concerning the midterms. ‘Twitter’s content moderation council will include representatives with widely divergent views, which will certainly include the civil rights community and groups who face hate-fueled violence,’ Mr Musk tweeted close to 1am eastern time on Wednesday. The Washington Post reported that Mr Musk’s posts came after a Zoom meeting with civil rights groups. Mr Musk tweeted that Twitter will ‘continue to combat hate & harassment & enforce its election integrity policies’.The president of one of the groups taking part in the meeting, Rashad Robinson of Color of Change, told The Post that ‘I think it’s important … he’s made these statements now publicly’. Mr Musk tweeted that the other groups taking part included the NAACP, the Anti-Defamation League, Free Press, LULAC, and The Asian American Foundation. The meeting went on for almost an hour. Mr Robinson told the paper that they discussed the harm that could come from allowing people to return to Twitter who have broken the rules on numerous occasions. ‘I thought the conversation was respectful. It was not contentious,’ Mr Robinson told The Post. ‘We stressed what was important. He stressed his vision.’The meeting occurred after almost 50 groups signed a letter to the top advertisers on Twitter requesting that they stop advertising on the platform if Mr Musk ‘follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation’. ‘Not only are extremists celebrating Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they are seeing it as a new opportunity to post the most abusive, harassing, and racist language and imagery,’ the organisations wrote, slamming Mr Musk for openly supporting the idea of restoring of accounts ‘of prominent individuals Twitter had suspended for inciting and glorifying political violence’. ‘We will be looking to see what Mr Musk does in terms of how he implements these policies,’ Mr Robinson told the paper. ‘Everything is so new and early and everything seems like it could change with a tweet.’