Elon Musk has said he will create a “content moderation council” at Twitter, in one of his first acts after closing his $44bn deal to take the social media platform private.
The billionaire entrepreneur on Friday said the council would have “widely diverse viewpoints”, and that “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes”.
The statement is one of the first concrete signals of how Musk, a self-declared “free speech absolutist”, plans to address content moderation challenges after closing the deal to buy the company for $54.20 a share late on Thursday.
Musk has already started his ownership of Twitter with characteristic bombast, firing top executives, including chief executive Parag Agrawal and head of safety Vijaya Gadde, and tweeting one-liners. “[T]he bird is freed,” he wrote hours after the deal closed, having already changed his public profile to “Chief Twit”.
A regulatory filing from the New York Stock Exchange on Friday morning confirmed that the deal had closed the previous day, marking the end of a tempestuous acquisition process.
Musk’s moderation announcement comes amid speculation that he might have moved to immediately allow high-profile, banned users to reactivate their accounts, including former President Donald Trump. Twitter removed Trump’s account in January 2021 for tweets it deemed were “highly likely to encourage and inspire” followers to replicate the US Capitol attack.
But Musk has previously said he wants to loosen content restrictions and repeal permanent bans, and in May told a Financial Times conference that banning Trump from the platform was a “mistake”. Trump’s supporters on Friday called on Musk to reactivate the former president’s account, using the hashtag #bringbacktrump.
Posting on his own platform Truth Social, Trump said he was “very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands”. He told Fox News that he was “staying on Truth” although he did not rule out a return to Twitter if allowed to do so.
Separately on Friday, responding to one user called Catturd who complained that they were “shadowbanned” on the platform — meaning their content is restricted from being shown to others without their knowledge — Musk wrote that he would be “digging in more today”.
Reopening the site to controversial speech was welcomed by right-leaning groups but raised concerns among others that it would result in a wave of hate, harassment, misinformation and extremism. It could also prompt a backlash from companies that Twitter depends on for advertising.
Musk addressed a tweet to “Twitter Advertisers” on Thursday, saying he wanted the site to resemble a “common digital town square” but not a “free-for-all hellscape”.
However, a small set of users took to the platform to share obscenities, which remained online. Twitter’s press team did not respond to requests for comment.