WaPo article: https://archive.is/wip/sgViP
Company owner Elon Musk tweeted that the change was a “temporary emergency measure” to deter third-party scraping of data from the social media platform. “We were getting data pillaged so much that it was degrading service for normal users!” Musk wrote.
User "elonmusk" not found
A lot of accounts were unbanned. Unfortunately, there was a threshold in numbers of followers - because it wasn't realistic to go through the millions upon millions of accounts banned by the ancien regime (some of them for good reasons).
They dodn't need to go thru them- just unban everyone banned for "harassment", "hate speech" and the other standard BS excuses they used.
Or just unban everyone but CP or spambots and say "everybody now gets a 2nd chance"