‘The Big Bang’: Twitter Starts Reinstating Tens Of Thousands Of Major Accounts That Were Banned, Report Says

Twitter CEO Elon Musk has reportedly started to reinstate tens of thousands of Twitter accounts that have significant followings in an event that some inside the company are calling “the Big Bang.”

The news comes after Musk announced last week a blanket amnesty for Twitter users permanently suspended from the platform. Musk made the decision Thursday in response to the final results of a poll he tweeted Wednesday. The platform has already started unbanning accounts en masse, except for those who broke the law or engaged in excessive spam.

Employees at the company reportedly learned of the mass unbanning through Musk’s tweets and scrambled to try to figure out what he meant by the stipulations set forth in the tweets.

Platformer reported that since Musk’s tweet, Twitter has “begun the process of reinstating roughly 62,000 accounts with more than 10,000 followers, including one account that has over 5 million followers, and 75 accounts with over 1 million followers.”

The news comes after Musk already reinstated the account of former President Donald Trump on the platform despite Trump’s repeated insistence that he will never return.

The move to unban tens of thousands of accounts could prove to cause further problems that the company is having with getting major companies to continue to run advertisements on the platform.

Investor slides shared by Musk say that the daily inflow of new users has reached two million, while “user active minutes per day” likewise reached eight billion. The company now has more than 250 million monetizable daily active users, Musk says. All three metrics exceed previous company records.

Musk has been attempting to avoid impersonations by selling verification subscriptions for $8 per month, a policy that has repeatedly been reversed and reintroduced. The slides said that reported impersonations spiked after he took control of the company before falling once again.

The slides also show that purported hate speech impressions have been lower since Musk acquired the platform. Musk, who claimed he purchased Twitter to promote free expression and peaceful dialogue across the political spectrum, revealed last week that the company is still defining hate speech with “the same list of terms” implemented before the acquisition.

Musk also hinted at a number of new offerings from “Twitter 2.0,” including enhanced video content, long-form tweets, encrypted direct messages, and entertaining advertisements.

John Rigolizzo and Ben Zeisloft contributed to this report.

Related: ‘Go To War’: Musk Targets Apple, Claiming It Canceled Ads, Threatened To Boot Twitter From App Store