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Musk’s takeover also led some prominent Twitter users associated with Russian and Chinese state-backed media outlets to call for Twitter to remove labels identifying their accounts as propaganda.
Twitter and other social networks have used the labels since the 2016 election to defend against foreign election interference and misinformation.
Margarita Simonyan, the editor in chief of the Russian government-backed broadcaster RT, called for Musk to remove the “shadow ban” from her account and appealed to Musk’s stated commitments to “free speech.”
But European regulators reminded Musk Friday that they’d be closely scrutinizing any changes he made to the platform, 75 percent of whose users live outside the United States. A sweeping new law set to come into force in the European Union would force Twitter and other tech companies to fight misinformation and limit the spread of illegal content. E.U. officials said during a news conference on Friday that they will be watching to make sure Twitter complies with these new regulations, known as the Digital Services Act.
“In Europe, the bird will fly by our rules,” Thierry Breton, an E.U. commissioner who has helped oversee tech policy,
tweeted Friday, a reference to Twitter’s bird logo. Musk earlier had tweeted that the bird had been uncaged.
Alex Stamos, a former Facebook chief security officer who now leads the Stanford Internet Observatory, said the pitfalls and complexities of online content moderation will quickly become apparent to Musk, whose other business ventures, such as Tesla and SpaceX, could require interaction with foreign governments seeking to gain influence over Twitter’s reach.
With so much “at stake in China,” Stamos tweeted, “what is Musk going to do with these public requests to lift labeling on state propagandists and private asks to stop looking for covert influence campaigns?”
One person who remained noticeably absent from Twitter on Friday was Trump, whose account was indefinitely suspended due to fears of violent incitement after a crowd of his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol on
Jan. 6, 2021.
Musk has said he would end lifetime bans, including Trump’s, on the basis that they weaken Twitter’s role as a platform for free expression. Trump, however,
told Fox News on Friday that he would stay on his own company’s smaller Twitter clone, Truth Social, even if he was invited back, adding, “I don’t think Twitter can be successful without me.”
Trump’s Truth Social account has roughly 4 million followers, a small fraction of the 88 million followers he had at his Twitter peak.