But during much of the day, those who embraced Musk’s call to make Twitter a haven of “free speech” were eager to see what they could get away with.

Popular right-wing pundits tweeted buzzwords such as “ivermectin”, and “Trump won” to see whether they would be penalised for content they suggested would previously have been flagged.

Ivermectin, a cheap drug that kills parasites in humans and animals, has been promoted by some Republican lawmakers and conservative talk show hosts as an effective way to treat Covid-19. But health experts have been pushing back, warning there’s scant evidence to support the belief that it works.

“Ok, @elonmusk, is this thing on..?” Steve Cortes, a former commentator for the conservative television network Newsmax and adviser to former US president Donald Trump wrote in a tweet, where he included a microphone emoji. “THERE ARE TWO SEXES TRUMP WON IVERMECTIN ROCKS.”

In a letter aimed to soothe the fears of advertisers, Musk vowed on Thursday that Twitter would not be a “free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences”.

But the jury is still out on what will become of the social media platform – and what it will tolerate.

Observers are eyeing who stays, who goes and who might potentially come back from the list of people the platform has banned over the years. They range from Trump to conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and former Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke – none of whom have returned to the platform so far.

Associated Press checked at least a dozen other Twitter accounts that were suspended by the platform – including those used by right-wing activist James O’Keefe and MyPillow Chief Executive Mike Lindell – and each turned up an “account suspended” message as of Friday afternoon.

At least one still found a way to get his message out.

“I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country,” Trump said on Friday morning in a post on his social media platform Truth Social, leaving no indication of whether he would return to the platform or not even though Musk has said he would allow it.

“I LOVE TRUTH!,” he said, adding Twitter will be “better” if it works to get rid of bots and fake accounts “that have hurt it so badly”.

Earlier in the day, news outlets reported Kanye West, the rapper legally known as Ye, appeared to be back on Twitter after being locked out of his account earlier this month over his anti-Semitic posts on the social media platform.

But there was no evidence to suggest the status of his account had changed or that Musk played a role, and there was no sign of recent activity. Twitter did not immediately reply to a request for comment on whether Ye was back on the platform. The rapper and fashion designer had also been suspended from Instagram, where his account there was recently reinstated.

Meanwhile, dozens of extremist profiles – some newly created – circulated racial slurs and Nazi imagery while expressing gratitude to Musk for his new leadership. One such post shared a breaking news update about Musk taking over the company, tweeting a racial slur and the message, “thank you Elon”.

Another anonymous account tweeted, “Elon now controls Twitter, unleash the racial slurs”, along with several derogatory comments.

“His acquisition of Twitter has opened Pandora’s box,” the advocacy group Ultraviolet said in a prepared statement on Friday, while also urging Musk, Twitter executives and the company’s board of directors to continue to enforce the ban on Trump “as well as violent right-wing extremists and white supremacists”.

Some users reacted to the news by threatening to quit, and others made fun of them for doing so. The terms “Elon” and “deleting” appeared in Twitter’s top trends on Friday as users discussed the fallout.

Speculation also permeated the platform. Some worried the number of their Twitter followers was plunging, theorising that Twitter may be cleaning up bots. Other users posted unverified reports that their “like” counts were dwindling.

“Elon Musk bought a platform, he didn’t buy people,” said Jennifer Grygiel, a social media expert and professor at Syracuse University. “And we still have a choice in how we get our news, our information and how we communicate.”

Grygiel said there will be a flight to quality if Twitter descends into further chaos under Musk, and maybe that is not a bad thing as the platform has increasingly come to serve corporate and state media interests.

And as always, users were quick to crack jokes – aiming to cut through the disorder in more comical ways.

“In honor of Elon now owning this site, I’d like to start utter chaos,” CNN commentator Bakari Sellers wrote in a tweet on Friday morning. “Which is better Popeyes or Bojangles and why?”