Under the leadership of Elon Musk, Twitter recently reinstated tens of thousands of accounts, some of which belonged to vaccination conspirators or opponents, at the risk of reviving a phenomenon of misinformation on the social network.
According to developer Travis Brown cited by various organizations, more than 27,000 restored accounts had been suspended for reasons of misinformation, harassment and hate speech. Contacted by AFP, he said that his list was incomplete and that the number of these accounts could be higher.
“Less moderation of hate speech”
“And there will be less moderation of hate speech, which will make the network less hospitable to many users,” he adds.
Among the personalities that return to the blue bird, “anti-vaccine” figures such as cardiologist Peter McCullough or doctor Robert Malone, who had been suspended a year ago for having warned of the supposed danger of vaccines against coronavirus, without verified information that backed up.
Since lifting the suspension of his account, Robert Malone, who has more than 869,000 subscribers, has posted several messages with false information about the covid-19 vaccine.
Among the former outcasts once again authorized on the social network, there is also former President Donald Trump, who nevertheless keeps, for the moment, his promise not to return and to only use the Truth Social social network, which he himself created last year. past.
Questioning the 2020 US Election Ballot
Mike Lindell is one of those who have taken up the torch. Suspended twice in 2021, the CEO of the My Pillow company and staunch supporter of Donald Trump called, as soon as his account was restored, to “melt down electronic voting machines to turn them into prison bars.”
A direct reference to the conspiracy theory that the vote count in the 2020 presidential election was rigged with the help of voting machines, which has never been proven.
Also reinstated on Twitter is far-right activist Pamela Geller, introduced by the counter-extremism legal organization Southern Poverty Law Center as “one of America’s most flamboyant anti-Muslim activists.”
Earlier this week, the creator of the site The Geller Report published a message about Muslim students who had complained that a teacher had shown them images of the Prophet Muhammad.
“Has he been beheaded yet?” he tweeted, referring to the murder of French history and geography professor Samuel Paty in Conflans-Sainte-Honorine, outside Paris, in October 2020.
“Determined to prevent dangerous content”
In mid-December, Twitter said in a post on its platform that a “permanent suspension was a disproportionate measure for breaking the rules” of the social network.
Elon Musk later clarified that Twitter “remains committed to preventing dangerous content” on its site, as well as “malicious actors.” “Reinstated accounts must always follow our rules.”
Twitter came into question this week after an incident involving Buffalo Bills football player Damar Hamlin. The 24-year-old defender’s cardiac arrest on Monday after a scare on the pitch was the occasion for many Twitter users to make a connection to the coronavirus vaccine.
“Before covid shots you didn’t see athletes go down hard on the field like they do today,” House Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene tweeted. “It’s time to investigate covid vaccines.”
Although Elon Musk has recently indicated that he plans to hand over management of Twitter, “it will take longer to fix” the platform, warns Nora Benavidez of the Free Press media observatory.
It will be necessary, he warns, to take “a series of steps to reverse Musk’s changes, reinvest in moderation, and restructure the governance of the platform.”
Source: BFM TV
