Twitter’s New Safety Chief Gives Key Update on ‘General Amnesty’ of Banned Accounts

Elon Musk's Twitter profile on a smartphone placed on printed Twitter logos on April 28, 2022. (Dado Ruvic/Illustration/Reuters)

Twitter’s new head of Trust and Safety has announced that a “general amnesty” review of suspended user accounts will be completed within around 30 days, with the announcement coming around a month after Twitter CEO Elon Musk pledged to start reinstating banned accounts that hadn’t broken the law or engaged in “egregious spam.”

Ella Irwin, who took over from Twitter’s former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth after he left the company, gave the update in response to a thread that claimed some Twitter accounts were being locked out simply for “tweeting official government crime stats.”

The thread, from an account called A New Radical Centrism (@newradcentrism), noted that a number of accounts—including Monitoring Bias (@monitoringbias) and journalist Steve Sailer (@Steve_Sailer)—had been suspended for posting accurate crime statistics.

One of the accounts was locked over a post that corrected the percentage of U.S. homicides committed by blacks from 53 percent to 60.4 percent, according to a screengrab shared by A New Radical Centrism.

The thread was shared by a blue-check account called The Rabbit Hole, with the comment: “I suspect many of these suspensions resulted from platform manipulation where Woke mobs mass report rival accounts.”

“Ultimately, I don’t see a clear path for effectively debating Wokeness if emerging accounts who argue with data are getting suspended. Hope this gets corrected,” The Rabbit Hole account wrote.

Irwin replied to this post, saying that the Twitter team has been busy reviewing thousands of locked accounts since Musk vowed to press ahead with a general amnesty.

“Our team has been carefully reviewing thousands of suspended accounts for the past month, including accounts noted in this thread. Users that did not engage in threats of harm/ violence, fraud or other illegal activity are being reinstated,” Irwin wrote. “Will need ~30 days to finish reviewing.”

 Accounts Reactivated

Several of the banned accounts—including Monitoring Bias—have been reactivated since Irwin announced the 30-day timeframe.

“The reinstatement of my account tonight is apparently due to the efforts of her team. (My account is one of those to which she is referring when she says ‘noted in this thread.’),” the Monitoring Bias account said in a tweet. “This bodes well for Twitter’s future.”

Irwin was also asked about whether the BIPOC Doing Racism (@BIPOCracism) account would be reinstated and she replied that it’s “on the list for review this week.”

The account has since been reinstated.

The Twitter head of trust and safety also responded to a tweet that argued it’s “time to change the system that bans” accounts in the first place.

“Working on that too in parallel,” Irwin wrote.

‘The People Have Spoken’

About a month after Musk took over Twitter in October, he ran an online poll asking whether accounts banned for reasons other than for breaking the law or posting “egregious spam” should be granted a “general amnesty.”

Over 70 percent of the 3 million-plus people who voted said “yes.”

“The people have spoken,” Musk wrote in response. “Amnesty begins next week. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he added, using a Latin phrase that translates to “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Musk ran the poll shortly after he reinstated a number of suspended accounts, including former President Donald Trump’s.

Prior to reactivating Trump’s account, which has nearly 88 million followers, the former president had been locked out for two years.

Trump has yet to post anything on Twitter, however, with his last post being from Jan. 8, 2021: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

The former president has since launched his own social media platform, Truth Social, where he posts regularly.

Trump said he has no interest in resuming his activity on Twitter.

Shortly before Musk reactivated Trump’s account, he reinstated a number of suspended accounts, including those of psychology professor Jordan Peterson and The Babylon Bee.

Doxxing Policy Violations

Musk sparked controversy in mid December when he suspended a half dozen or so journalists’ accounts that shared his real-time location or linked to sites that did the doxxing.

The account suspensions came a day after Twitter announced changes to its Private Information policy—commonly referred to as its doxxing policy—prohibiting the sharing of real-time location information or linking to external sources that share such data, citing a “risk of physical harm.”

Around that time, Musk also said that what he described as a “crazy stalker” had climbed onto a car carrying his 2-year-old son.

Prior to the suspension of the journalists’ accounts (which have since been restored), Musk had been concerned about an account (@ElonJet) that was sharing his private jet movements, citing a risk to his safety.

The @ElonJet account has been suspended under Twitter’s new doxxing policy, along with a number of other accounts sharing private jet location information, including for Jeff Bezos’s and Mark Zuckerberg’s personal planes.

Musk said the journalists whose accounts were temporarily suspended had posted his “exact real-time location, basically assassination coordinates.”

Some of the journalists disputed the claim that they had exposed Musk’s location in real time in violation of Twitter’s new anti-doxxing policy.

“To be clear, there was no ‘doxing’–even if an impulsive, accountable-to-nobody oligarch said so,” Tony Webster, one of those whose accounts had been suspended, said in a tweet shortly after his account was restored.

Journalist Andy Rupar wrote on Substack on Dec. 15 that he has “no idea what rules I purportedly broke” and that he hasn’t had contact with Twitter regarding the suspension of his account.

Rupar’s account has since been restored.

In much the same vein as with the “general amnesty,” Musk polled Twitter users whether he should reinstate suspended accounts of journalists who he said had doxxed his real-time location.

The majority of respondents voted for an immediate reinstatement.

“The people have spoken,” Musk said in response. “Accounts who doxxed my location will have their suspension lifted now.”