Conservatives and anti-vaxxers are frantically lobbying Elon Musk to lift Twitter bans on their idols after he took over

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A swathe of high-profile conservatives, as well as anti-vaxxers, are clamoring for Elon Musk reinstate banned accounts now that he is in control of Twitter. 

Elon Musk became Twitter’s owner on Thursday after months of back-and-forth over his initial bid.

He’s long suggested he’d take a lighter touch with moderation, saying in a May interview that he would “reverse the permaban” on former President Donald Trump. 

In a tweet aimed at advertisers on Thursday, he said the platform wouldn’t be a “free-for-all hellscape” but reiterated his belief in a “digital town square” where all views can be aired.

In one of numerous tweets on moderation issues, he said he was against “censorship that goes far beyond the law.”

The question of whether Trump will return to Twitter soon — or at all — is still an open one, as Insider’s Britney Nguyen and Grace Dean reported.

In the meantime, there are plenty of other demands. In a tweet congratulating Musk, Rep. Lauren Boebert asked for conservative satirical news site the Babylon Bee to be allowed to tweet again: 

Twitter suspended the account in March after it made a transphobic post about Health and Human Services Assistant Secretary Rachel Levine. The account hasn’t tweeted since then, and as of August it remained locked as the site’s CEO, Kyle Mann, said he won’t delete the tweet as a matter of principle, according to Reason. 

It’s one of the instances that spurred Musk’s interest in buying the platform, according to Bloomberg.

Writing “free them all,” Newsmax pundit Benny Johnson posted a video to Twitter on Friday showing the accounts of dozens of rightwing and far-right figures including Roger Stone, Steve Bannon, the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, Mike Lindell, “Proud Boy” Gavin McInnes, and Alex Jones. 

Ben Shapiro called for the reinstatement of Jordan Peterson in a tweet that was endorsed by Piers Morgan: 

Peterson was suspended in June after making a transphobic tweet, this time about the actor Elliott Page. 

The head of Russia’s state-controlled media outlets RT and Sputnik, Margarita Simonyan, also asked Musk to remove restrictions on their accounts.

RT and Sputnik are not, in fact, banned and continue to post.

But Twitter is enforcing legal sanctions on the networks in the EU and UK which prevents people seeing their content.

Simonyan and others also complained about “shadowbans” — a term that describes limiting a post’s reach covertly while leaving it live.

Twitter has said it never shadowbans anybody, though Musk said Friday he was “digging in” to the allegations.

Musk may well have raised Simonyan’s hopes when it court documents around the Twitter acquisition revealed in late September that he had praised the networks. Following the networks’ ban across the EU, Musk wrote in text messages that Russian media has a “lot of bullshit, but some good points too.”

An Australian far-right outlet’s correspondent, Avi Yemini, called for the return of British extremist Tommy Robinson, tweeting a video in which Robinson claimed he had been banned for speaking “facts” about Muslims.

Twitter did not specify exactly which statement had prompted the permanent ban, in March. 

On the side of vaccine misinformation, large numbers of users also tweeted at Musk to ask him to award blue-tick status, or to undo restrictions, on high-profile anti-vaxxers such as Dr Robert Malone, Dr Sherri Tenpenny, and Dr Pierre Kory. 

Dr Simone Gold, the founder of vaccine disinformation group America’s Frontline Doctors (AFLD), asked Musk to reinstate “Frontline News” on the platform, though it’s unclear exactly which account she was referring to. 

Evolutionary biologist and podcaster Bret Weinstein, who has long questioned COVID-19 vaccine efficacy, also called for Musk to reinstate anti-vaxxer Dr Robert Malone.