Elon Musk says Twitter will offer ‘amnesty’ to suspended accounts

Yahoo Finance’s Daniel Howley joins the Live show to discuss Elon Musk’s decision to grant amnesty to suspended Twitter accounts.

Video transcript

JARED BLIKRE: Welcome back. Twitter is going to start granting Amnesty to suspended accounts, according to Elon Musk. For more on changes at the social media company, let's bring in Yahoo Finance's tech editor, Dan Howley. Dan, the latest with this?

DAN HOWLEY: That's right, Jared. Elon Musk tweeted out that he-- first, he tweeted out a poll asking if he wanted to-- people wanted him to offer general amnesty to accounts that had been suspended. And after the polling results, he said that that's what he's going to do.

So essentially, what this means is anybody that has their account suspended and hasn't broken any law will see their accounts reinstated. Now, obviously, this means that there's going to be a chance of increased vitriol, racism, antisemitism, things along those lines that you might see online from accounts that were previously suspended for things such as that.

So, you know, this is gonna be a big change at Twitter a time where, you know, Elon Musk is flip-flopping on what he previously said he would do. He, prior to this, said that there would be no kind of decisions made on moderation until after he sets up a moderation council and they're able to kind of oversee what the company's plans would be for monitoring and moderating the speech on the platform.

And so he's kind of throwing that all out the window and saying, let's just let everybody back in and have a big old party. You know, this also means that advertisers are likely to be even more hesitant to rejoin the service, just because he's now kind of throwing this all into chaos. And so, you know, it doesn't seem as though there's one particular plan at this point. You can't imagine that advertisers are gonna be happy with this kind of move.

BRIAN SOZZI: Hey, Dan, myself and Jared are global celebrities with blue checkmarks. Are we losing those next week?

DAN HOWLEY: No. So what's going to be happening is there's going to be a few different checkmarks, according to Musk. Now there's going to be regular blue checkmarks for everyone. There'll be, I believe, orange checkmarks for others. And those would be things along the lines of, say, organizations.

And then there's going to be another kind of gray checkmark. So, you know, there's going to be this kind of three-checkmark system. That could get confusing for a lot of people. You know, Twitter is, you know, opaque, to say the least, for early users.

Obviously, he's touting that there's been an uptick in users since he's taken over. You have to wonder what that means for those users, then, if they're going to see this platform and all of these different checkmarks and then all these changes happening all at once.

BRIAN SOZZI: Thanks for easing our concerns, Dan Howley. Appreciate it.