There is a lot of debate over Musk's recent actions with Twitter, which basically boils down to whether it is better allowing freedom of expression and/or countering Twitter's previous left leaning bias or whether he is intentionally adding a right leaning bias to Twitter, which answer you're told is true depends on if you happen to be on Fox News's or CNN's website. I am not asking which is true, and in fact ask that we not get bogged down on debate about that fact!
Groups claiming that Musk is adding a right leaning bias to the site often point to Musk's unbanning of Trump and a number of far-right individuals recently. Musk claims this was a neutral act of encouraging free speech by being less restrictive in allowed speech ("New Twitter policy is freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach."), his opponents claim it's an intentional favoring of extremists conservative voices intended to help spread hate/misinformation/etc.
One obvious metric for determining which claim is true, which I've yet to see any side bring up, is whether Musk unbanned traditionally liberal accounts as well as conservative ones, i.e., was he being selective in his unbanning or truly unbanning everyone.
I thus have three, related, questions about his unbanning of what I'll call 'left' accounts.
- Has he unbanned any left leaning accounts (I assume this one will be true)
- Has the number of left leaning unbanned accounts close to equal to the number of right leaning accounts (I suspect this is false, see bullet point)
- Has the ratio of unbanned right vs left accounts been proportionate to the ratio of previously banned right to left accounts. *
* I believe there is a good chance that there were more right favoring accounts banned then left favoring accounts pre Musk, and no I don't want to get into an argument whether that is due to Twitter's bias or right leaning accounts more likely to violate Twitter's rules right now. The third question is mostly to adjust for this potential discrepancy, if more right leaning accounts were banned to start with then more would be expected to be unbanned even if Musk wasn't targeting right leaning accounts explicitly. Thus only a ratio comparing unbanned to previously banned accounts can say whether Musk was being selective in which accounts to unban.
Let me stress I'm asking only if Musk was being selective in his choice of accounts to unban. I realize there is a whole separate debate about whether, even if he was not selective, such an unban process is justified or wise, but I don't want to get into that now. I only want to know what facts say about whether he was selectively favoring right leaning accounts when the unbanning process happened.
I'm looking for facts, not opinion, so I'd prefer links to credible sources if possible. I realize the third question may be hard to answer, especially given the grey area inherent in trying to define an account as 'right' or 'left'. I'll accept the best possible answer I get even if it doesn't fully answer all three questions, but I hope I might get a comprehensive answer to all three.