Elon Musk has put a ‘temporary hold’ on his proposed takeover of Twitter, the billionaire has confirmed.
The Tesla owner agreed a deal to buy the social media platform in a £34.5bn deal last month.
Mr Musk has pledged to ‘improve free speech’ on the website, while many users have criticised the move.
But the 50-year-old tweeted on Friday that the deal is now “temporarily on hold” as his team await details on the number of spam and fake accounts on the platform.
He also linked to the report which said that Twitter estimates that spam and fake account make up less than five per cent of its daily users.
It is unclear as to how this could impact the tech mogul’s bid for the company.
But in a later tweet, Mr Musk said that he was “still committed” to the acquisition.
He wrote: “Twitter deal temporarily on hold pending details supporting calculation that spam/fake accounts do indeed represent less than five per cent of users.
“Still committed to acquisition.”
Earlier this week, Elon Musk vowed to reverse Donald Trump’s permanent ban from website if his takeover bid goes through.
The former US President was deemed to have breached the website’s ‘glorification of violence’ policy following the deadly storming of the Capitol last year.
Trump questioned the legitimacy of the US Presidential Election of 2020, which saw him lose out to Joe Biden.
Speaking virtually at the Financial Times Future of the Car Summit earlier this week, Mr Musk said that Twitter’s decision to ban Trump was ‘morally bad’ and claimed it undermined the public’s trust in the platform.
He argued that tweeted that are illegal or ‘destructive’ should be deleted or made invisible - with permanent bans being a last resort.
“I think there’s general question of should Twitter have permanent bans?”, he said.
“I’ve talked with Jack Dorsey about this and he and I are of the same mind which is that permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots or spam scam accounts.
“I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake because it an alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice… I think this could end up being frankly worse than having a single forum where everyone can debate
“So I guess the answer is that I would reverse the permanent ban, obviously, I don’t own Twitter yet, so this is not a thing that will definitely happen because what if I don’t own Twitter?
“But my opinion and Jack Dorsey, I want to be clear, shares, that we should not have permanent bans.
“Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody gets to say whatever they want to say, if they say something that is illegal or otherwise, just destructive to the world, then that there should be perhaps a timeout, a temporary suspension, or that particular tweet should be made invisible or have very limited traction.”
