Elon Musk says Twitter's team was 'too intense' with suspending false accounts and is 'moving to chill mode'
Musk said Twitter's team had been "too intense" with suspending fake accounts.
One user complained that accounts posting positive content and memes were being suspended.
Musk said the team in charge of suspensions was "moving to chill mode."
Elon Musk said on Sunday night that the team responsible for removing spam and bot accounts on Twitter had been "a bit too intense" when suspending users on the site, and would be told to "chill" going forward.
After one Twitter user complained about Twitter suspending a number of genuine accounts that posted "memes and positivity," Musk responded: "Team was a bit too intense with spam/bot suspensions. Moving to chill mode."
Musk had tweeted on Thursday that that the platform was "purging a lot of spam/scam accounts," and that users might subsequently see their follower numbers drop.
Musk's issue with fake accounts defined his six-month saga with Twitter over buying the platform. Musk originally terminated his deal to buy Twitter in July saying that the number of spam and bot accounts on the platform was far higher than what Twitter had disclosed to him in financial reports. Musk's analysis found that fake accounts on Twitter were "higher than 5%."
The billionaire CEO promised back in April that if his buyout of Twitter succeeded he would "defeat the spam bots or die trying!" He added to to the tweet that he wanted to "authenticate all real humans."
Twitter's new trust and safety head Ella Irwin said that Musk's top priority was platform safety in an interview with Reuters.
Irwin highlighted that the social media platform was now relying more on artificial intelligence to spot and address harmful content.
Several left-wing activists had their accounts suspended unfairly over the past few weeks because Twitter's trust and safety team has been "decimated," one activist impacted told Insider. Key members of the team quit or were fired including Irwin's predecessors, Vijaya Gadde and Yoel Roth.
On Friday, journalist Matt Taibbi released "The Twitter Files," in a thread under Musk's instructions, to show how Twitter suppressed the content of Hunter Biden's laptop being released before the 2020 presidential elections.
The exposé doxxed multiple people including revealing the email addresses of former CEO Jack Dorsey and politician Rohit Khanna, The Verge reported.
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