USA: Twitter's newly appointed boss Elon Musk announced on Thursday that he is giving an "amnesty" to suspended accounts, which online security experts believe will lead to a rise in harassment, hate speech and misinformation.

The billionaire made his announcement after a poll posted on his timeline sought votes on whether to reinstate accounts that "have not broken the law or engaged in serious spam". 72% of voters chose yes.

"The people have spoken. Next week, the amnesty will begin." Musk used the Latin phrase "vox populi, vox Dei", which translates to "voice of the people, voice of God", in his tweet.

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After publishing a similar poll late last week, Musk used the same Latin phrase before reactivating former US President Donald Trump's account, which Twitter blocked on January 6, 2021, for inciting the Capitol uprising. was suspended. Trump has said he will not use Twitter. again but haven't deactivated my account.

Online polls like this are far from scientific and are highly susceptible to manipulation by bots.

There has been a reported increase in racist, anti-Semitic and other toxic speech on the world's virtual public square in the month since Musk took control of Twitter. This includes an increase in racial slurs directed at World Cup soccer players, which Twitter is allegedly ignoring.

The chaos that followed Musk's decision to fire top executives, lay off half of the company's 7,500 employees and then issue a series of ultimatums led to hundreds more resignations, largely due to an increase in damaging material. Is responsible.

Untold numbers of contractors in charge of content moderation were also fired. Yoel Roth, Twitter's head of trust and security, was among those who quit because of a lack of faith in Musk's ability to prevent Twitter from degenerating into a chaos of uncontrolled speech.

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Musk announced on Twitter on October 28, a day after assuming leadership, that no suspended accounts would be reinstated until Twitter established a "Content Moderation Council" with multiple perspectives to weigh the situation.

On Tuesday, he claimed he was going back on his word because "a large coalition of political-social activist groups" had forced him to do so, and he subsequently suspended Twitter's at least temporarily withdrawal from advertisers. "broke the deal" by requesting it stop being used as a platform for their campaigns.

A day earlier, Twitter banned the personal account of far-right US Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene, which was shut down in January for breaking the website's anti-Covid-19 misinformation guidelines.

While this is going on, Musk is growing closer to right-wing figures on Twitter. He urged "independent-minded" voters to support Republicans ahead of this month's US midterm elections.

Twitter reviewed and removed hateful content more slowly this year than in 2021, according to a European Union report released on Thursday.

The study's findings were based on information collected in the spring, before Musk acquired Twitter, as part of an annual assessment of how well online platforms comply with the European Union's disinformation code of conduct.

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It found that, down from 82% in 2021, Twitter evaluated more than half of the reports it received about illegal hate speech within 24 hours.