Almost two years after the former US president was barred from the social media site for encouraging violence, Elon Musk has restored Donald Trump’s account on Twitter.
After Musk, the platform’s new owner conducted a poll on the social media site, which showed slender support for allowing Trump to return, Trump’s account returned on Twitter on Saturday.
The question of whether Trump’s account should be resurrected received more than 15 million votes, with a narrow majority of 51.8 percent in favor of Trump.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted.
But Trump said earlier on Saturday that he had no interest in returning to the platform.
“I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said via video when asked whether he planned to return to Twitter by a panel at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting.
Donald Trump declared he would remain with his new platform Truth Social
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Trump declared he would remain with his new platform Truth Social, an app created by his start-up Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which he claimed was performing “phenomenally well” and had higher user interaction than Twitter.
Trump, who on Tuesday announced his intention to run again for president in 2024, also hailed Musk and claimed to have admired him his entire life.
The former president added that Twitter’s issues were “extraordinary” and that it was plagued by bots and false accounts.
This week, Musk unbanned comic Kathy Griffin
Trump’s potential return was eagerly monitored — and feared — by many of Twitter’s advertisers after Musk first stated in May that he intended to restore the ban.
Since then, Musk has worked to reassure users and advertisers that such a choice would be carefully considered by a content moderation committee made up of individuals with “widely diverse perspectives” and that no account reinstatements would take place before the council meeting.
Additionally, he added that unless there was a “clear method for doing so,” Twitter would not permit any banned users to be reactivated.
This week, Musk unbanned comic Kathy Griffin after she changed her user name to “Elon Musk,” violating his new policy against impersonation without making it clear the account was a parody.
Major advertisers, already alarmed by Musk’s radical remaking of the site, may become less worried if Trump does not return to Twitter.
He has drastically reduced the trust and safety team, which is in charge of stopping the spread of hazardous content and misinformation, and he has cut the personnel in half.
Large firms have stopped advertising on the site while they examine how the platform handles hate speech as a result of these moves and Musk’s tweets.
Only days after an engineering-related mass resignation, Bloomberg reported on Saturday that Twitter may be forced to lay off further staff members in its sales and partnership units.
