CNN
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Former US President Donald Trump’s Twitter account has been reinstated on the platform.
The account, which Twitter banned after the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol, was restored after Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk posted a poll on Twitter late Friday asking users of the platform whether Trump should be reinstated.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted Saturday night. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei”, in Latin, “the voice of the people is the voice of God”.
The final results of the poll on Saturday night showed 51.8% in favor and 48.2% against. The poll included 15 million votes.
The long-awaited decision by the new owner sets the stage for the former president’s return to the social media platform where he was previously its most influential, if controversial, user with nearly 90 million followers and tweets that often rocked the markets, the news states. . cycle and pushed the agenda in Washington.
Trump has previously said he would remain on his platform, Truth Social, rather than rejoin Twitter, but a change in his approach could have major political implications. The former president announced this month that he will seek the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, with the goal of becoming the second commander-in-chief elected to two non-consecutive terms.
Asked Saturday what he thought of Musk buying Twitter and his own future on the platform, Trump praised Musk but questioned whether the site would survive the current crisis.
“They have a lot of problems,” Trump said in Las Vegas at the Republican Jewish Coalition meeting. “You see what is happening. I may make it, I may not make it.”
Still, Trump said he liked Musk and “liked that he bought (Twitter).”
“He’s a character and I tend to like characters,” the former president said of Musk. But he is smart.
During Trump’s tenure in the White House, Twitter was central to his presidency, a fact that also benefited the company in the form of countless hours of user engagement. Twitter often took a light-hearted approach to moderating his account, arguing at times that as a public official, the then-president should be given wide freedom to speak.
But as Trump neared the end of his term, tweeting more and more misinformation alleging voter fraud, the balance shifted. The company began applying warning labels to its tweets in an attempt to correct its misleading claims ahead of the 2020 presidential election. And following the riot at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, the platform He banned it indefinitely.
“After a thorough review of recent tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context surrounding them, we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement to violence,” Twitter said at the time. “In the context of the horrific events of this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules could result in this same course of action.”
The decision followed two tweets from Trump that Twitter said violated the company’s policy against the glorification of violence. The tweets, Twitter said at the time, “should be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the president’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior of this account in recent weeks”.
The first tweet, a statement about Trump’s supporters, whom he called “75,000,000 of the great patriotic Americans who voted for me,” suggested that he “plans to continue supporting, empowering, and protecting those who believe he won the election,” Twitter had said. . .
The second, indicating that he did not plan to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration, could be seen as a further statement that the election was not legitimate and could be interpreted as Trump saying that the inauguration would be a “safe” target for violence because he will not attend, according to Twitter.
Shortly after Trump’s Twitter ban, he was also restricted from using Meta’s Facebook and Instagram, which could also restore his accounts in January 2023.
On November 18, Musk tweeted that he had reinstated several controversial accounts on the platform, but that “no decision has yet been made from Trump.”
“Twitter’s new policy is free speech, but not free reach,” he said at the time. “Negative/hate tweets will be minimized and demonetized, so there will be no ads or other revenue for Twitter. You won’t find the tweet unless you specifically search for it, which is no different than the rest of the internet.”
Musk had previously said he disagreed with Twitter’s permanent ban policy and may also return other accounts that have been removed from the platform for repeated rule violations.
“I think it was wrong to ban Donald Trump; I think it was a mistake,” Musk said at a conference in May, vowing to reverse the ban if he became the owner of the company.
Jack Dorsey, who was Twitter’s chief executive when the company banned Trump but has since left, responded to Musk’s comments by saying he agreed there should be no permanent bans. Banning the former president, he said, was a “business decision” and “shouldn’t have been.”
NAACP President Derrick Johnson called on advertisers who still fund Twitter to immediately stop all ad buys.
“In Elon Musk’s Twittersphere, you can incite an insurrection at the US Capitol, resulting in the deaths of multiple people, and still be allowed to spew hate speech and violent conspiracies on his platform,” he said. Johnson in a statement. “If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter this way, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all.”
