On Thursday, the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, announced in a tweet that he had decided to issue a “general pardon” for the frozen accounts on his site and to reactivate them starting next week. The decision was based on the result of a 24-hour referendum he conducted on the platform.
Musk said that the “general amnesty” for suspended Twitter accounts will begin next week, in response to a tweet he published on Wednesday. In that previous tweet, Musk asked his followers to answer a referendum question about whether or not Twitter should grant an amnesty for accounts that have been suspended but have not broken any laws or sent explicit spam.
Should Twitter offer a general amnesty to suspended accounts, provided that they have not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam?
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 23, 2022
Out of all the people who answered Musk’s question, 72.4% said “yes” while 27.6% responded with “no”.
Last week, Musk reactivated Donald Trump’s Twitter account after it was banned following the January 6th Capitol building invasion. This announcement came with the same phrase, “the people have said their word.”
Musk, who is the richest man in the world as well as the owner of Tesla and SpaceX, chose to reactivate Trump’s account after seeing that a similar referendum he conducted had results that favored the ex-president.
At the end of October, Musk bought the Blue Bird platform for $44 billion.
