Analysis of 1,000 reinstated Twitter accounts: most are deeply partisan, support Donald Trump, and spread misinformation on COVID-19, election fraud, and QAnon
Many reinstated users are tweeting about topics that got them barred in the first place: Covid-19 skepticism, election denialism and QAnon.
Context & Ripple Effects
This analysis quantifies what began as anecdote: on December 16, Twitter brought back at least a dozen far-right figures, including election-misinformation promoter Mike Lindell and QAnon adherent Patrick Byrne (the December 16 reinstatements). Sampling 1,000 restored accounts, the Times finds the pattern generalizes — most are deeply partisan, pro-Trump, and tweeting about the very topics that got them barred.
The reversal is stark against the recent record: in January 2021, 93% of surveyed tech experts approved of suspending Trump's accounts after January 6, yet his allies have since beaten down successive efforts to filter election lies. This study is the first broad measurement of what the un-filtering actually returned to the platform.
First-order effects
- Advertisers — the source of Twitter's $1.08 billion in Q2 2022 ad revenue — are now buying placements adjacent to accounts that resumed COVID skepticism, election denialism, and QAnon content immediately upon restoration.
- The named reinstated users, including Lindell and Byrne, regain reach for exactly the election-fraud and QAnon material that triggered their original bans.
Second-order effects
- Prior research found Trump's fact-check-labeled tweets spread further than unlabeled ones, so label-based containment likely fails here too, pushing the monitoring burden onto outside researchers and newsrooms rather than the platform itself.
- Competing platforms' moderation stances become a market differentiator, as brands and users seeking enforced rules now face a clear fork between Twitter and more restrictive rivals.
Third-order effects
- Moderation policy is shifting from rules applied consistently to decisions reflecting the owner's politics — the inversion of the 2021 expert consensus inside two years shows enforcement norms can be unwound faster than they were built.
- If reinstatement-at-scale holds, containment of election and health misinformation migrates structurally away from platforms toward advertisers, regulators, and downstream distributors.
The trend: Platform governance is flipping from enforcement-led suspension to owner-directed reinstatement, turning misinformation policy from a rules question into a partisan one.