Starting from the 1st of February 2023, Twitter users will be given the privilege to appeal account suspensions and be evaluated under Twitter’s new criteria for reinstatement.
Under the new criteria, the company disclosed that accounts will only be suspended for severe policy violations like threats, violence, Harassment, Posting of illicit content, illegal activities, etc.
It further noted that it would take less severe action, in comparison to account suspension, such as limiting the reach of tweets that violate its policies or demanding that users remove offensive tweets before continuing to use the account.
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It would be recalled that when Musk took over the platform in October last year, in one of the first steps towards his promise of lighter moderation on Twitter, he reinstated several accounts that were previously subject to lifetime bans.
In November last year, Elon Musk disclosed that he will begin restoring most previously banned accounts on Twitter, in his most wide-reaching move to undo the social media platform’s policy of permanently suspending users who repeatedly violated its rules.
Accounts such as that of former United States president Donald Trump who was banned on the platform in January 2021, due to the risk of further incitement, following the horrifying insurrection at the Capitol was reinstated.
Also, accounts belonging to U.S rapper Kanye West, Andrew Tate, Jordan Peterson, Kathy Griffin, and the parody account the Babylon bee, all had their account reinstated.
Meanwhile, on the 15th of December 2022, Musk suspended half a dozen prominent journalists at CNN, New York Times, stating that they violated Twitter rules about revealing people’s locations.
Musk claimed that the journalists had violated his new “doxxing” policy by sharing his “exact real-time” location, amounting to what he described as “assassination coordinates.” Meanwhile, none of the banned journalists appeared to have shared Musk’s precise real-time location.
The ban on the journalist was coming a day after Twitter suspended more than 25 accounts that tracked the planes of government agencies, and high-profile individuals, including that of Musk.
Initially, Musk had disclosed that he would allow the account that tracked his private jet to remain on Twitter, though he said it amounted to a security threat. But the Twitter CEO later changed his mind by banning the account, after he revealed that a car in which one of his sons was traveling was accosted by a striker.
This prompted him to disclose via a tweet that any account that posted real-time location info of anyone will be suspended, which includes posting links to sites with real-time location info.
Also, days after Elon Musk declared that “comedy is now legal on Twitter,” in November 2022, the platform banned several comedians for parody tweets in which they impersonated its new owner.