New Twitter CEO Elon Musk is seemingly continuing to favor right-wing content during his effort to reinstate previously suspended accounts as part of his misguided vision of transforming Twitter into the “digital town square.”
This week, Media Matters analyzed independent software developer Travis Brown’s data sets that were released between December 14-20 and include recently reinstated Twitter accounts. After narrowing down the data to the 50 most followed accounts, we found that 60% of these accounts pushed right-wing content to their over 6 million combined followers.
Since taking control of the platform, Musk has reinstated thousands of accounts, many of which have pushed misinformation, right-wing talking points, and white nationalist ideology.
Over the last week, Musk — a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” — baselessly suspended multiple journalists for supposedly violating Twitter’s new “doxxing” policy or a briefly updated policy against the promotion of other social media platforms. (The accounts have all been reinstated and the latter policy was quickly revoked.) The day after suspending many of these journalists, Musk reinstated a dozen more right-wing accounts, including a white nationalist who attended the January 6, 2021, Capitol insurrection.
Media Matters found that out of the 50 reinstated accounts from last week with the most followers, 30 accounts — or 60% — were right-wing. Only 2 accounts — or 4% — were left-wing. These newly reinstated accounts include anti-Muslim extremists, far-right activists, election deniers, and others who have pushed COVID-19 misinformation.
