Tag: reinstates
Maryland Court Reinstates Adnan Syed’s Murder Conviction Over Legal Technicality
A Maryland Appellate Court ruled on Tuesday that Adnan Syed’s murder case is being sent back to trial, citing that a lower court violated the murder victim’s family’s rights to attend the trial in person. Syed was convicted of murdering his high school girlfriend Hae Min Lee in 1999 and was sentenced to life in…
YouTube reinstates Donald Trump’s channel
The Wall Street Journal: Biden EPA reinstates limits on mercury, restoring regulation stripped away by Trump
Twitter reinstates banned journalists’ accounts
Twitter reinstates at least eight accounts suspended in the ‘Thursday Night Massacre’
Mashable’s Matt Binder is among eight journalists whose suspended accounts have been reinstated after they were locked in what has been dubbed the Thursday Night Massacre (That’s even the name of the Wikipedia article). The suspensions occurred on Dec. 15, and the accounts belonged to tech journalists who had been critical of site owner Elon Musk.
Musk orchestrated sweeping changes to the site’s doxxing policy on Wednesday night in response to an incident with an alleged “crazy stalker,” and he retroactively explained the suspensions as having been enforcement of the new rule. Binder finds this explanation dubious, but notes that part of being owner of Twitter is that Musk “doesn’t need a reason,” to suspend accounts he doesn’t like. It’s rich for Musk to call himself a “free speech absolutist,” and criticize Twitter’s former leadership for being too hasty with bans when he’s this eager to suspend his critics — particularly after he specifically said he welcomed his enemies on Twitter.
Reinstated journalists as of Saturday morning are as follows:
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Matt Binder, Mashable
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Aaron Rupar, independent
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Ryan Mac, The New York Times
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Drew Harwell, The Washington Post
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Steve Herman, Voice of America
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Micah Lee, The Intercept
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Donie O’Sullivan, CNN
The account for the competing social media platform Mastodon is also back.
As of this writing on Saturday morning, the accounts belonging to Matt Binder, as well as some of the others, include a placeholder for a tweet with the text “This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules” in it. Matt Binder believes the removed post may have been a retweet, and notes, “they didn’t ask me to delete anything,” so it remains unclear exactly what the rule violation ostensibly was.
Musk had posted polls asking if and when the accounts should be reinstated, and the replies overwhelmingly supported reinstatement as soon as possible. Musk was upfront about this when the accounts were reinstated, and tweeted one of his new catchphrases: “The people have spoken.”
However, one notable exception to the wave of reinstatements is broadcaster Keith Olbermann, who may have earned additional disapprobation from Musk by tweeting from a secondary account. Olbermann remains suspended as of this writing.
The account of Musk-critical journalist Linette Lopez, which was not part of the initial rollout of suspensions, is still suspended for now.
Twitter reinstates accounts of some suspended journalists and Mastodon
Twitter has announced through its Safety account that it has “identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules.” The website has already started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violating those rules, the tweet continued, and it will lift more suspensions every week over the next month. Twitter didn’t specify the policies it’s talking about and which accounts will be reinstated. But upon checking, the accounts of Mastodon and the journalists recently banned due to the website’s new doxxing rules are up and running again.
To understand what happened, we have to go back a few days. The website banned several accounts over the past week, starting with @ElonJet, the account that tracked flights of Elon Musk’s private jet using publicly available data. Other accounts that also tracked the planes of government agencies and high-profile individuals were banned, as well.
On his account, Musk announced that any account “doxxing real-time location info of anyone will be suspended.” In a follow-up tweet, he said that a car carrying his child was “followed by crazy stalker” and that he was taking legal action against Jack Sweeney, the college student who ran @ElonJet, and “organizations who supported harm to [his] family.” As of this writing, the @ElonJet account is still suspended.
We’ve identified several policies where permanent suspension was a disproportionate action for breaking Twitter rules. We recently started reinstating accounts that were suspended for violations of these policies and plan to expand to more accounts weekly over the next 30 days.
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) December 17, 2022
Shortly after that, Twitter also suspended the account of its rival social network Mastodon when it tweeted a link to the account tracking Musk’s jet on its own service. It’s worth noting that Twitter seems to have started flagging posts containing the word “Mastodon” as “sensitive content” days before this happened. Users also found themselves unable to post links to Mastodon servers.
In addition to Mastodon, Twitter suspended the accounts of several journalists who report on Elon Musk and the social network itself. Most of them talked about Sweeney or linked to @ElonJet in some way, and based on Musk’s responses to questions about the event, the journalists were suspended due to Twitter’s new doxxing rules. One of the banned journalists, The Washington Post’s Drew Harwell, posted a screenshot of the tweet that the website had flagged for doxxing: It was a report about Mastodon’s suspension for tweeting a link to it service’s own @ElonJet account.
Following the journalists’ suspensions, Musk posted a poll asking people whether he should reinstate the accounts of users who doxxed his exact location in real time “now” or “in 7 days.” The “now” option won, and Musk promised that those accounts will be restored. So far, Twitter has reinstated Harwell’s account, along with the accounts of The New York Times’Ryan Mac, Mashable’sMatt Binder, The Intercept’sMicah Lee and CNN’sDonie O’Sullivan. Keith Olbermann’s account is still suspended, and it’s unclear if Twitter will lift @ElonJet’s suspension in the coming days.
Twitter reinstates account of Daily Stormer’s infamous neo-Nazi creator
Twitter has restored the account of Andrew Anglin, one of America’s most notorious neo-Nazis. The creator of the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer had been banned from the social media platform for nearly a decade. His return would appear to be part of Elon Musk’s offer of “general amnesty” to users who had “not broken the law or engaged in egregious spam.” Anglin, it should be noted, is currently in hiding while attempting to avoid a 2019 court order to pay $14 million for leading a harassment campaign against Jewish residents in Montana.
Neo-Nazi Andrew Anglin, who was booted off Twitter in 2013, has had his account restored. pic.twitter.com/sEv5UDVUw2
— Right Wing Watch (@RightWingWatch) December 2, 2022
Shortly after regaining control of his account, Anglin tweeted a defense of Ye, the rapper formerly known as Kanye West. “Saying you love Hitler is not even a big deal,” Anglin said, referencing Ye’s recent InfoWars interview. “No one cares about that. The man died 80 years ago.” Ye’s now-infamous interview with Alex Jones saw the rapper declare his “love” for Adolf Hitler and deny that the Holocaust had ever happened. Anglin later tweeted an endorsement of Ye’s 2024 presidential campaign.
The reinstatement comes in the same week Twitter suspended Ye for tweeting a photo of the Star of David merged with a swastika. Anglin is only one of a few prominent white nationalists to return to Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the company. One estimate by software engineer Travis Brown suggests Twitter has restored as many as 12,000 accounts since October 27th, including those belonging to Richard Spencer and Patrick Casey.
White nationalist Patrick Casey, who has repeatedly ban evaded on Twitter, (https://t.co/qjFcmNTyOa), claimed that he has been reinstated on the platform. Casey thanked Twitter owner Elon Musk for the supposed development. pic.twitter.com/bf5ROtwELa
— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) November 30, 2022
The return of even just one avowed neo-Nazi is likely to reinforce fears from civil rights groups, advertisers and governments over Elon Musk’s handling of the platform. On November 26th, the billionaire claimed hate speech impressions had recently decreased compared to October last year. However, findings from the Center for Countering Digital Hate, the Anti-Defamation League and other groups that study online platforms suggest that there’s been a dramatic increase in the prevalence of hate speech on Twitter since Musk’s takeover.