On this photo illustration, the image of Elon Musk is displayed on a pc screen and the brand of twitter on a cell phone in Ankara, Turkiye on October 06, 2022.
Muhammed Selim Korkutata | Anadolu Agency | Getty Images
After closing a $44 billion transaction to take Twitter private, Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk — now the de facto CEO of Twitter — announced that he plans to form a “content moderation council” on the social networking company. He says he won’t make any “major content decisions” or reinstate any accounts that were previously banned before the council convenes.
In May 2022, after Musk had agreed to purchase Twitter at $54.20 per share, he said he would reverse Twitter’s lifetime ban on former President Donald Trump if the acquisition went through.
On the time, Musk said, “I might reverse the everlasting ban… I do not own Twitter yet. So this shouldn’t be like a thing that will certainly occur, because what if I do not own Twitter?”
Musk has not yet offered details about how his content moderation council will work, who will likely be invited to it and whether Twitter’s will likely be roughly independent or powerful than Facebook’s oversight board.
Twitter rival Facebook has been roundly criticized for using a council approach to creating content moderation decisions.
One among Musk’s first big moves after closing the deal was to fireside Twitter’s CEO, Parag Agrawal, and other executives including its prior head of safety, Vijaya Gadde, who was involved in the choice to suspend Trump, and ban political promoting on Twitter.
Twitter banned Trump from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the U.S. Capitol, which occurred just as a joint session of Congress met to certify the election of President Joe Biden. The riot was intended to disrupt the counting of the electoral votes.
As CNBC previously reported, Trump was issued a subpoena earlier this month by the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 riot.
The committee, which voted unanimously on this move, is requiring Trump’s testimony under oath next month and records relevant to their probe into the attack, which the panel noted got here after weeks of his denying losing the 2020 election to President Joe Biden.
Committee Chair Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Miss., and Vice Chair Liz Cheney, R-Wyo., in a letter to Trump cited what they called his central role in a deliberate effort to reverse his loss within the 2020 presidential election and to stay in power.
As NBC News previously reported, a Twitter worker named Anika Navaroli provided testimony to the Jan. 6 committee suggesting that the social network didn’t do all the pieces in its power in time to forestall violence on that day.
It was clear that individuals using Twitter were plotting violence, in response to her testimony, and Twitter detected a surge in violent tags like “Execute Mike Pence” around Jan. 6, for instance. Trump had “fanned the flames” of violent users’ persistent calls to hold Mike Pence, she testified.
CNBC couldn’t immediately ascertain whether Navaroli continues to be employed at Twitter.
Early within the Trump presidency, Musk served on a White House economic advisory board and a producing jobs initiative council. But he stepped down from each in 2017, after Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris climate accords.
Despite this, Trump praised Musk effusively in 2020, calling him “one among our great geniuses” during an interview with “Squawk Box” co-host Joe Kernen on the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.
Trump praised Musk again on Friday for taking Twitter private. The previous president previously said he wouldn’t return to the platform, but that would change now that the corporate is run by Musk.
In May, Musk tweeted, “Up to now I voted Democrat, because they were (mostly) the kindness party. But they’ve develop into the party of division & hate, so I can not support them and can vote Republican.”
