Elon Musk just brought a notorious neo-Nazi back to Twitter • businessroundups.org

You may have crossed the line by tweeting a swastika topped with a Star of David, but you can’t blame other Nazi apologists for getting mixed signals.

On Thursday night, Musk personally intervened after the artist formerly known as Kanye West shared the symbol. “I did my best,” Musk tweeted in response to a tweet that raised the alarm about West’s behavior. “Despite this, he again violated our rule against incitement to violence. Account is suspended.”

On Truth Social, West shared a screenshot showing he was only suspended from Twitter for 12 hours — a relatively lenient sentence. But West’s account was still suspended at 1 p.m. PT on Friday.

Hours prior to his suspension, West openly elaborated on his anti-Semitic beliefs in an interview with Alex Jones. Appearing on the show in a full mask, West praised Hitler, repeatedly declaring his “love” for Nazis and doubling down when a visibly uncomfortable Jones gave him a chance to come back.

As Nazi-related hashtags take over Twitter’s trending topics, the infamous neo-Nazi is Andrew Anglin reappeared on the site, tweeting from a new entry linked to the account he had banned in 2015. Anglin, who created the white supremacist website The Daily Stormer, examined Twitter’s new rules in a reply to Musk. “You got a 12-hour suspension for tweeting a Star of David with a swastika in it… Whatever the rules, people will follow them. We just need to know what the rules are.”

Anglin was removed from the wider internet when companies that provided The Daily Stormer’s web hosting, DDoS protection, and other utilities shut down their services in 2017. the right-wing rally in Charlottesville sounded the alarm about a rising tide of overt white supremacy in the US. dig” and called for the death of “enemies of the white race”.

Anglin’s fans quickly welcomed him back to the platform. One account with a clear reference to white supremacy in its handle tweeted that it was checking in for duty. Other neo-Nazi and white supremacist accounts criticized Musk’s action against West, characterizing them as unexpected betrayal.

Richard Spencer is also benefiting from Musk’s changes on Twitter. Spencer, one Unite the right organizer and an avowed white nationalist who has greeted supporters with the Nazi salute is now a verified Twitter user who pays for a Twitter Blue monthly subscription. Spencer is currently promoting a Twitter Space declaring “Ye-ism triumphant”.

Twitter’s pre-Musk policy against hateful behavior is still online, but the company’s new owner seems to be mostly following it lately. Last week, Musk conducted a Twitter poll of his followers and later declared an “amnesty” for all accounts that “have not broken the law or engaged in gross spam.” That decision allowed for potentially thousands of accounts that previously violated Twitter’s policies against hate and harassment to be reinstated on the platform.

Musk’s one-man approach to content moderation is unlikely to scale. Billionaire Tesla and the CEO of SpaceX killed Twitter’s moderation teams when he took over the company last month. He also lost Twitter’s Global Head of Trust & Safety Yoel Roth, who helped guide the company through many of its thorniest policy decisions in recent years. “One of my limits was that if Twitter were to be governed by dictatorial edict rather than policy… there would be no need for me in my role, doing what I do,” Roth said in his first conversation after departure this week.

Despite his early promises of a policy-making council, Musk has so far relied on unscientific Twitter polls directed at his supporters to establish the platform’s rules. According to Research of the ADL, white supremacists and other extremists saw the opportunity and encouraged their supporters to vote in Musk’s “amnesty” poll on Telegram.

A Telegram channel with thousands of followers warned members planning to return to Twitter: “Refrain from blatant insults; don’t make it easy for them.”