Over sixty two thousand accounts that were previously suspended on Twitter have been reinstated following Elon Musk’s general amnesty plan.
Twitter began the process of reinstating about 62,000 accounts with over 10,000 followers, including one account with over 5 million followers and 75 accounts with 1 million or more followers.
The move, which Twitter employees have started calling “the Big Bang,” comes after Musk polled Twitter users asking if the company should grant a “general amnesty” to suspended accounts.
Twitter has also stopped enforcing its COVID-19 misinformation policy and has slashed its Child Sex Abuse Material team to just one person despite Musk promising that removing CSAM would be Twitter’s “priority #1.”
It means the company will no longer prioritize removing or tagging misleading health information related to Covid-19.
Twitter said in December 2020 that it would begin to label and remove misinformation about Covid-19 vaccines as thousands of accounts made false claims about the coronavirus and the adverse impacts of immunizations.
Twiter’s CSAM removal teams work with various organizations that collect data about CSAM content. That data is used in Twitter systems that remove CSAM content, and Twitter’s internal dashboards are considered critical for analyzing metadata to help people writing code to identify CSAM networks and remove them before content is shared.
Multiple civil rights groups earlier this month urged advertisers to pause advertising on Twitter after the company laid off thousands of employees, a move the groups feared would impede the company’s ability to moderate hateful and other problematic content.
