After meeting with a group of civil rights leaders about his content moderation plans, new “Chief Twit” Elon Musk has committed to uphold existing election integrity policies until at least after the results of next week’s U.S. midterm elections have been certified. According to statements from leaders who attended the meeting, the mogul said he will not reinstate previously banned Twitter users until there is a transparent process for doing so. Musk also committed to including representatives from groups that suffer from hate-fueled violence in his proposed content moderation council.

Twitter CEO Elon Musk single-handedly led a call on Tuesday with civil rights groups in an effort to assure them that he would curtail hate speech — and stop the spread of misinformation ahead of the midterm elections.

Musk said that Twitter employees responsible for election integrity who had been locked out of their moderation tools during the company’s acquisition will have their access reinstated by the end of the week, three people on the call confirmed.

Musk also said that users banned by the platform — including former President Donald Trump — will remain off the site “for at least a few more weeks.”

A group of more than 40 civil society organizations on Tuesday sent a letter urging the top 20 Twitter advertisers to threaten to suspend their ads globally if the platform’s new owner Elon Musk won’t commit to enforcing safety standards and community guidelines.

“We, the undersigned organizations, call on you to notify Musk and publicly commit that you will cease all advertising on Twitter globally if he follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards, including gutting content moderation. This means that Musk must not roll back the basic moderation practices Twitter already has on the books now and must commit to actually enforcing those rules,” the civil society groups wrote in their open letter to the advertising CEOs.

Advocacy organizations are placing pressure on advertisers. On Tuesday, 40 groups banded together to send a letter to some of Twitter’s top advertisers urging them to demand “the maintenance of basic brand safety standards and community guidelines.” Among the marketers who received the missive were Amazon, Anheuser-Busch, Apple, Capital One Financial Corporation, CBS, CenturyLink, Coca-Cola Company, Comcast Corporation, Best Buy Co., Disney, Google, Home Box Office, IBM, Merck & Co., Meta Platforms, Mondelez International, PepsiCo, Procter & Gamble, Unilever and Verizon. Among the organizers are Free Press, Accountable Tech and Media Matters for America.

On Tuesday, 40 civil society groups wrote an open letter to the CEOs of Twitter’s 20 top advertisers — including Amazon, Apple, Google and Meta — calling on them to stop advertising on Twitter globally if Musk continues to do things that “undermine brand safety and community standards by gutting content moderation.”

Additionally, a dozen high-end brands represented by luxury advertising firm GroupM said they wanted to stop advertising on Twitter if Donald Trump rejoined the platform, GroupM told the Wall Street Journal last Friday. General Motors also announced last Friday it also was temporarily stopping advertising on Twitter.

On Tuesday, a coalition of more than 40 civil-society groups published an open letter to the 20 brands that spend the most on Twitter. The letter called on them to suspend their ad spending “if Mr. Musk follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”

On Monday, Angelo Carusone, CEO of media watchdog Media Matters for America, tweeted calling on major Twitter advertisers “to be putting pressure on Twitter right now” to better address the increase in hate and other toxic content. On Tuesday, a group of more than 40 civil society organizations, including Media Matters, the NAACP, GLAAD and the Center for Countering Digital Hate, sent an open letter to Twitter’s top advertisers calling on them to halt advertising on the platform if Musk cuts back on content moderation. 'Advertisers are very sensitive to the changing landscape of social media,” said Atkin, adding that the question for Twitter is now “whether Elon Musk can continue to broker trust with advertisers or if he’s going to continue to sow uncertainty and fear.”

More than 50 organizations, however, signed a letter to Twitter’s top advertisers this week asking them to cease spending on the social media site if Musk “follows through on his plans to undermine brand safety and community standards including gutting content moderation.”

The groups noted that they were concerned about the spike in hate and disinformation on the platform in the hours after Musk took ownership.

“Not only are extremists celebrating Musk’s takeover of Twitter, they are seeing it as a new opportunity to post the most abusive, harassing, and racist language and imagery,” the groups wrote.

Many of the civil rights groups that met with Musk on Tuesday were part of the Stop Hate for Profit coalition that orchestrated an advertiser boycott of Facebook two years ago. Hundreds of companies paused their advertising on Facebook to protest hate speech on the social media site.

A coalition of more than 40 advocacy organizations including the NAACP and Free Press sent an open letter to Twitter's top 20 advertisers on Tuesday, asking them to pull their ads if Musk guts content moderation on the platform.

Mediabrands, a unit of ad holding company IPG, has advised its clients to pause advertising on Twitter for the next week until the company gives more details about its plans to protect trust and safety on the platform, according to a source familiar with the matter.

In response to Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter, 40 justice organizations and media watchdog groups on Tuesday sent a letter to top advertisers on the social platform, urging them to push Musk to embrace content moderation or boycott Twitter entirely.

Twitter Inc.’s top advertisers are being urged by dozens of advocacy groups to boycott the platform if its new billionaire owner Elon Musk lowers safety standards for content.

The groups pressed companies including Apple Inc., Best Buy Co., Coca-Cola Co. and Verizon Communications Inc. in a letter to their chief executive officers Tuesday to commit to stop advertising on Twitter if Musk allows hate speech, misinformation and conspiracy theories to flourish on the platform.

More than 40 civil rights groups also sent an open letter to 20 of Twitter’s top advertisers on Tuesday, urging them to suspend their advertising on Twitter if Mr. Musk throws out the platform’s content moderation safeguards. The letter, organized by groups such as Free Press and Media Matters for America and signed by organizations such as GLAAD and the N.A.A.C.P., was sent to top executives at companies such as Amazon, CBS, Coca-Cola, Disney, Mondelez and Procter & Gamble.

In the US, Stop the Deal, a coalition of left-wing activist groups including Fair Vote UK and Media Matters for America, said Mr Musk had a "thirst for chaos" and his potential plans would make Twitter "an even more hate-filled cesspool, leading to irreparable real-world harm".

"Elon Musk's acquisition and subsequent running of Twitter will radically transform the current information landscape in much the same way that the emergence of Fox News changed the information landscape back in the late '90s — and we will all be worse off for it," Angelo Carusone, president of the left-leaning nonprofit media watchdog Media Matters for America, said in a statement, predicting the rise of right-wing extremism as a direct result of Musk's leadership.

In the US, civil rights organizations warned of harmful content on the platform, while Republicans celebrated the change in ownership.

The firing of Gadde sparked concern among civil liberties groups that fought for Trump’s Twitter ban, such as Muslim Advocates.

“Elon Musk claims that he doesn’t want Twitter to become a ‘free-for-all hellscape’ but he would guarantee that outcome by letting white nationalist hatemongers back on the platform and pushing out the staff responsible for policing hate content,” said Muslim Advocates’ senior policy counsel, Sumayyah Waheed. “This is not about left v right political brinkmanship or collegiate debates over free speech. This is about the safety of communities of color, people of minority faiths and other marginalized communities who are already under assault.”

Civil rights advocates warn that the billionaire’s proposed changes, which are thus far vague but focus on moderating content less closely, in the name of “freedom of speech”, risk making the platform “a supercharged engine of radicalisation”. Allowing Trump to return in particular could have a huge impact on content.

“Despite his claim that he wanted to buy Twitter to ‘help humanity,’ Elon Musk has a record of posting and defending harmful anti-LGBTQ content as well as content that harms other marginalized communities,” said a statement released Friday by GLAAD. “GLAAD remains deeply concerned about the safety of LGBTQ people on Twitter and we join other organizations that are now questioning Twitter’s future policies and actions against extremist content.”

But if Twitter allows for more of that content under Musk, as he’s indicated, the change could cut into the number of users on those platforms — or even kill some of the alternative sites, said President and CEO of the left-leaning watchdog group Media Matters Angelo Carusone.