Having officially bought Twitter, Elon Musk will immediately appoint himself as Chief Executive Officer of the now-private social media giant.
Besides clearing out its top executives, the new leader reportedly plans to do away with permanently banned accounts across the platform.
No More Permabans
As reported by Bloomberg on Friday, Musk plans to replace Parag Agrawal as CEO after firing the executive on Friday. That’s according to people familiar with the matter, who asked not to be identified while discussing internal deliberations.
Other executive layoffs included the company’s legal policy head Vijaya Gadde and Chief Financial Officer Ned Segal.
Vijaya Gadde happens to be the one who made the call to permanently ban former President Donald Trump from the platform. His removal, according to Twitter, was in response to his alleged “incitement of violence” in the context of events surrounding the January 6th capitol hill protest in 2020.
Yet according to Bloomberg’s sources, Musk plans to cease all permanent bans on the platform because he does not believe in “lifelong prohibitions” – meaning previously banned accounts, like Trump’s, may be allowed to return.
It remains unclear, however, how soon those banned accounts may be allowed to return, if at all.
In response to a user’s complaint on Twitter, Musk also said on Friday that he’d “dig into ” users who were “shadowbanned, ghost banned, search banned,” or had their followers removed. These refer to instances of users who aren’t explicitly banned but have seemingly had their social reach limited by Twitter’s algorithm without any notice.
Bastion of Free Speech
Since declaring his intention to buy Twitter in April, Musk’s primary intention has been to turn Twitter into a “digital town square,” where people of wide-ranging beliefs can non-violently discuss their differences. He reiterated this point in a public statement on Thursday, highlighting a looming “great danger” of social media splintering into “far right-wing and far left-wing echo chambers.”
Crypto Twitter is generally optimistic about Musk’s takeover of the platform, due to his commitment to free speech and removing its rampant spam bots.
We will have freedom of speech if the @Twitter platform can protect the citizens from the establishment above and bots below.
— Michael Saylor
(@saylor) October 26, 2022
Some users have claimed that bots are already less prevalent under some crypto-related hashtags since Musk’s takeover. There is little data to support this at present, however.
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