By: Andrew Lu

Since January 2022, Elon Musk began buying Twitter stock, and eventually, in April, he became the largest shareholder. That’s when he decided to buy the entire company. With a dramatic timeline, Musk eventually bought it at the end of October 2022, for $44 billion. Musk, a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist,” lifted bans on the thousands of Twitter Users that previously violated Twitter’s rules.

Musk first claimed that the policy was only for a bot or spam accounts, lifting the ban for Former President Trump and a few others. After that, he discontinued several journalists’ accounts, saying they had shared public flight data, revealing his location.

Of the people that got their accounts reinstated, Bright Data collected information for the New York Times, and the data was analyzed. Most of the accounts were Trump supporters or political extremists. Most were banned for sharing misleading information on Covid-19 or the 2020 election.

As soon as their accounts were given back, users began Tweeting. One said, “I finally got this account back after being banned for being a #Republican thanks @elonmusk. Just 10 minutes later, the same user wrote, “Joe Biden is an illegitimate president and the 2020 election was stolen.”

Since last year, 10,000 or so accounts were banned for promoting a misleading documentary called “Died Suddenly,” which claims that so many people died suddenly because of the covid-19 vaccine. There are also many users who push for fake election results, like the 2020 Presidential election and many later governors and congress elections.

Those users are thanking Elon Musk for de-banning them, but are they a positive influence on society? Maybe we should rethink the lifted bans on Twitter users.