To prevent “serious or continuous, recurrent infractions,” Twitter will only ban accounts on a case-by-case basis. In addition, the firm claims that as of February 1st, anybody will be able to appeal suspensions, and that the new criteria will be used to the appeals process.

Is there anything Twitter can do except delete your account? Twitter has long used “less severe measures,” such as reducing a tweet’s visibility or requiring a user to delete a tweet before they can log back in. Today’s shift means that Twitter will now make more use of these alternatives before resorting to banning accounts.

The firm also promises to be more open about its enforcement activities and will release new tools next month to that end. For instance, Twitter’s CEO Elon Musk said last year that the platform would reveal whether or not a user had been “shadowbanned” and under what circumstances.

Twitter “did not restore accounts that participated in criminal activities, threats of injury or violence, large-scale spam and platform manipulation, or where there was no recent request to have the account reinstated,” the company claims today to defend its choices to bring those individuals back to Twitter. Twitter said in 2021 that it had permanently banned the former president “because to the potential of additional encouragement of violence,” therefore his reinstatement has raised some eyebrows. But maybe that’s because Elon wanted Trump back on and decided to have a straw poll among his own viewers, much like the original impetus for the amnesty legislation.