After Hurricane Helene, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right conservative from Georgia, shared on X the widely debunked claim that government scientists could control the weather. “It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done,” she wrote in one post.
The conspiracy theorist Alex Jones repeatedly posted on X erroneous claims about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, including that the Pentagon had somehow engineered the storms.
“Treason Alert,” Mr. Jones wrote in one post. “America is the target,” he warned in another.
In just those three posts, Ms. Greene and Mr. Jones racked up a combined 72,000 likes, and over 34,000 shares. They are only a handful of the many misleading diatribes and conspiracy theories that regularly appear on X.
Not long ago, those two would not have been able to publish those posts through their accounts.
Ms. Greene and Mr. Jones are among a large set of users who were barred from the site for spreading misinformation, inciting violence or otherwise violating its rules — and were reinstated after Elon Musk bought the platform, then known as Twitter, two years ago.
Many of these people picked up where they left off, according to a New York Times analysis of 50,000 posts by more than 100 high-profile reinstated users. They include Laura Loomer, a right-wing influencer who has campaigned with Mr. Trump; Mike Lindell, the chief executive of MyPillow; and Rogan O’Handley, a right-wing political commentator. All have a broad reach — at least 100,000 followers — and were identified by researchers who study disinformation or extremism on X.
Most hold right-wing or even far-right views, and are part of a broader political shift underway on X. With just weeks before the U.S. election, Democrats have been abandoning the platform, according to recent academic research, while use by Republicans has remained steady. After publicly endorsing Mr. Trump for president in July, Mr. Musk has used X as a bullhorn to promote the candidate, one that many of the reinstated accounts then echo.
The company has not disclosed how many people have been allowed back. The accounts tracked by The Times — political candidates, media personalities, Mr. Trump and members of his inner circle — are most likely a sliver and do not represent everyone who was reinstated. But they often propel the conspiracy theories that circulate on Mr. Musk’s social network.
Since coming back, the accounts have spread false claims and narratives about immigration, race, natural disasters and stolen elections:
The reach and potential influence of these accounts are reflections of a policy instituted by Mr. Musk in his early days of ownership in 2022, when he declared an “amnesty” program for previously suspended accounts.
Mr. Musk plays a big role in what spreads. He regularly responds to and shares claims made by the users tracked by The Times, elevating their posts to his 200 million followers. Many of the users have seen their follower counts explode since coming back.
Ten of the more popular users tracked by The Times attracted 26 million new followers since being reinstated. Mr. Trump now has 91.5 million followers, an increase of more than two million since his ban was lifted in November 2022.
Mr. Musk and X did not respond to repeated requests for comment on the reinstated accounts.
Every day, about a quarter of a billion people use X, which remains a popular destination for news. The power of the reinstated accounts to shape the discourse on the platform is enormous, as is the risk, said Isabelle Frances-Wright, the director of technology and society at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, a nonprofit research organization.
“X has gone from being a social network to, frankly at this point, an online opinion news network where the majority of the narratives and hateful content come from a very small group of people who affect the entirety of the platform in an outsized way,” Ms. Frances-Wright said.
The Reinstated
In the second half of 2021, months before Mr. Musk made an unsolicited offer to buy Twitter, the social network suspended more than 1.3 million accounts for a range of abuses, including harassing users, posting hateful material and spreading Covid misinformation. The company had already kicked off 70,000 accounts associated with the pro-Trump conspiracy movement QAnon in the wake of the Jan. 6 attack on Capitol Hill.
When Mr. Musk took over in October the next year, he vowed to immediately reinstate many users who he believed were unfairly barred. He had long accused Twitter of censoring conservative voices, describing himself as a “free speech absolutist.” (He rebranded the company as X in 2023.)
Mr. Musk ordered employees to conduct an audit of the banned accounts, according to three people with knowledge of the situation. If the accounts violated current rules against spam or child abuse, they remained banned. If they broke rules Mr. Musk had discarded, including ones against spreading misinformation about Covid or referring to people as a gender different from how they identified, they were allowed back.
Some estimates suggest that tens of thousands of users have been reinstated. The online safety commission in Australia said in January that more than 6,000 users in that country had been allowed back. But otherwise, little official data exists to tally the returns.
A handful of the accounts tracked by The Times express left-leaning and liberal views. But the vast majority of reinstated users in the group tend to share right-leaning posts. Researchers found this month that conservative accounts posting about Mr. Trump before the 2020 election shared more links to fake news and untrustworthy content than liberal accounts posting about President Biden did, and were more than four times as likely to be suspended.
Among those posting again is Mr. Jones, the Infowars founder, who was barred in 2018 after violating the platform’s policy against abusive behavior. Since being reinstated in December, he has averaged more than 40 posts a day, ranging from baseless speculation about vaccine safety to conspiracy theories about election fraud.
After the first assassination attempt against Mr. Trump, Mr. Jones falsely posted that it was a “coup” involving the “deep state.” The post has been viewed more than four million times.
Most of the accounts tracked by The Times were restored in late 2022, though some returned in 2023 and even this year. Mr. Trump posted only once in the first two years his account was back — his mug shot. But after an audio livestream on the site with Mr. Musk in August, the former president picked up his cadence. Now he regularly posts about the election, often to criticize his opponent, Ms. Harris.
A large share of the 102 tracked accounts repeatedly post about Ms. Harris’s race. Ms. Loomer took up the subject nearly 40 times on July 31, The Times found, the day the former president falsely suggested at a conference for Black journalists that Ms. Harris “became a Black person” only recently.
That day, Ms. Loomer proclaimed that “Kamala Harris is NOT black and never has been,” and that she had a copy of Ms. Harris’s birth certificate to prove it. The post was seen hundreds of thousands of times.
Ms. Loomer did not respond to a request for comment.
Karoline Leavitt, national press secretary for the Trump campaign, said Mr. Trump “will continue using every platform to cut through the liberal mainstream media bias and bring his winning MAGA message to every voter in this country.”
Mr. O’Handley, one of the conservative commentators let back on X, said in an email that he was “deeply appreciative” that Mr. Musk had reinstated his account and others that had been banned. Twitter’s earlier efforts to remove misinformation were a threat to free speech, he added. “Many of us now have millions of new followers because there are tens of millions of Americans who agree with our words,” he said.
Ms. Greene and a lawyer for Mr. Jones did not respond to requests for comment.
For many of the users tracked by The Times, X has been a growing megaphone. Alex Lorusso, a right-wing media personality who met Mr. Musk during a visit to X headquarters last year, has amassed a total 802,600 followers since returning in November 2022, a 948 percent jump.
Andrew Tate has added nearly 10 million followers since his reinstatement — up from fewer than 40,000 just before he was barred in 2017, according to the Times analysis. He has pushed a narrative this year that elections in London were rigged by liberal politicians who brought in hordes of immigrants to vote.
“When it’s made clear that certain kinds of speech are not only not going to be punished, but that prominent individuals who were deplatformed for it are now reinstated, it sends an extremely clear signal to everyone that this speech is now explicitly welcome on the platform,” said Paul E. Smaldino, a professor of cognitive and information sciences at the University of California, Merced.
Nearly all the accounts tracked by The Times are part of X’s Blue program, which verifies users — giving their commentary a sheen of trustworthiness and promoting their content in X’s recommendation algorithm.
Mr. Tate and Mr. Lorusso did not respond to requests for comment.
X still has rules prohibiting certain types of content. They include hateful conduct (including the spread of dehumanizing language or images), misleading and potentially harmful media (such as manipulated audio and fabricated images) and abusive or harassing posts (like unwanted sexual objectification or denial of violent events as hoaxes).
The company said last month that it had suspended nearly 5.3 million accounts in the first half of this year — half of which raised child safety concerns, including possible exploitation.
Despite its policies, incendiary content proliferates on X. A day after the first Trump assassination attempt, one post from a reinstated user threatened retribution against Democrats. “You won’t be able to walk the streets,” the user said. “You chose war. Don’t act surprised when we finish what you started.”
The post received nearly three million views.
The Owner
Within hours of his acquisition, Mr. Musk frustrated employees by calling for the reinstatement of The Babylon Bee, a right-wing satirical website, two people who worked for him at the time said. The publication had been banned after violating Twitter’s rule against misgendering. The employees persuaded Mr. Musk to wait until he revised the platform’s content moderation policies, cautioning him against reinstating accounts on an ad hoc basis.
Mr. Musk soon gutted the company’s safety teams, and eventually laid off 75 percent of the work force. Few remained to push back.
X has become increasingly opaque, and now operates with fewer guardrails to prevent toxic content from being posted.
Several recent studies found that accounts posting inappropriate content and misinformation make up a tiny portion of the user base of platforms like X but produce a hugely outsize amount of damaging material. The combination of minimal content moderation and wide-reaching toxic content is not prevalent across all social media, said Keith Burghardt, a computer scientist at the University of Southern California Information Sciences Institute.
To monitor conduct on the platform, Mr. Musk has largely relied on Community Notes, a program that lets certain users add fact-checking labels to posts. They vote on whether the labels are helpful, and those that are approved by the community are added by an algorithm.
X has determined that the program is sufficient to police most misinformation about the presidential election, two people with knowledge of the company’s plans said. Debunked content is still visible even if a fact check is appended.
More than half the reinstated accounts tracked by The Times have received at least one Community Note.
Posts from Jackson Hinkle, a conservative influencer who has been kicked off YouTube, Twitch and Instagram for spreading pro-Russian misinformation and false claims about the conflict in Gaza, have received at least 257 Community Notes since he got his X account back in 2022, according to the Times analysis.
Mr. Hinkle frequently appeals to his followers to flag the notes themselves as false — which can result in their removal — and occasionally tags Mr. Musk in his complaints about the program. Mr. Hinkle did not respond to a request for comment.
There is a symbiotic relationship between Mr. Musk and the accounts tracked by The Times. Several amplified rumors from him — later debunked by government officials — about the emergency response to Hurricane Helene. Nearly 90 percent of the reinstated accounts examined by The Times have tried to engage with the billionaire, often expressing their admiration for him.
One reinstated account bragged that it had received “the @elonmusk stamp of approval.” Until recently, Mr. Lorusso’s X profile read, “Banned in 2020 — freed by Elon Musk in 2022.” Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Mr. Trump, proclaimed that Mr. Musk “is a warrior worthy of our prayers.”
Mr. Musk frequently responds: He has tagged some of the tracked accounts more than 160 times since bringing them back, effectively exposing them to his 200 million followers. He drew attention to a post by Tommy Robinson, an anti-immigration activist who maintained a vocal online presence during xenophobic riots in Britain this summer, that made false claims about plans to replace imprisoned criminals with people who posted antigovernment content.
The politics of X’s user base have been shifting. Use of the platform among Democrats has slipped sharply since Mr. Musk took the reins, while Republican use has been stable, according to recent data from CHIP50, a large-scale polling project run by a consortium of university researchers from Harvard, Northeastern, Northwestern and Rutgers.
That has coincided with Mr. Musk’s endorsement of Mr. Trump’s bid for president. Mr. Musk broke from tradition set by social media executives to not publicly endorse candidates — even stumping with Mr. Trump at a rally this month — and, in doing so, erased any air of neutrality for the platform.
As the election nears, some of the high-profile reinstated accounts have begun to pre-emptively cast doubt on the results. Much of the commentary is reminiscent of the conspiracy theories that swirled after the 2020 election and in the lead-up to the Jan. 6 riot.
Since being welcomed back to the platform, roughly 80 percent of the accounts have discussed the idea of stolen elections, with most making some variation of the claim that Democrats were engaged in questionable voting schemes. Across at least 1,800 posts on the subject, the users drew more than 13 million likes, shares and other reactions.
Some prominent accounts shared a misleading video linked to the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank, that used shaky evidence to claim widespread voter registration of noncitizens. One of the posts received more than 750,000 views; Mr. Musk later circulated the video himself.
In late August, Mr. Trump claimed on X that Ms. Harris would destroy Social Security by allowing undocumented immigrants to tap into the program — a fear-mongering tactic that has informed false narratives claiming that Democrats are enabling noncitizens to vote.
Mr. Trump’s post garnered 9.4 million views. Many of the reinstated accounts repeated the claim nearly verbatim.
Methodology
The post Twitter Barred Them. What Happened When Elon Musk Brought Them Back? appeared first on New York Times.
