After a permanent ban on January 2021, the Twitter account of former President Donald Trump has been reinstated.
Elon Musk, a new Twitter owner, posted a poll on Friday asking whether Trump should be allowed to return to the platform. A little over 15 million people voted with 51.8% in favor of Trump’s reinstatement on Twitter.
Twitter had approximately a 237.8million monetizable daily users as of July 2022, when it filed its last quarterly earnings reports before going public. Trump’s account, however, was banned after Musk’s spontaneous poll concluded on Saturday.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi and Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted. He quoted a Latin phrase that translates as “the voice for people, the voice of God.”
The former president also said that he would run again for the nation’s highest office in 2024. Trump’s controversial ban was implemented days after the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol in which insurrectionists attempted to reverse the 2020 presidential election results.
“After careful review of tweets from @realDonaldTrump and the context surrounding them — specifically how they were received and interpreted on Twitter — we have permanently suspended this account due to the danger of further incitement to violence,” Twitter stated in a January 2021 post.
Elon Musk has already reversed the suspensions of two high-profile accounts that were de-platformed because they misgendered trans people. He also lifted the ban on Kathy Griffin (a comedian who impersonated Musk via Twitter).
Musk had expressed support for overturning the ban that had been placed on the former president when he first announced his bid for Twitter’s takeover. Musk now owns the company and uses his Twitter account to post updates about platform policy.
Musk tweeted yesterday before he started his poll about Trump’s account. “Negative/hate Tweets will be maximum deboosted and demonetized so that no ads or other revenue is to Twitter.”
Musk has already gone back and forth in his tenure on implementing new features. So it isn’t easy to believe that his words are the final word regarding how Twitter will handle content moderating. However, Musk is setting a precedent at Twitter with his willingness to allow the results of a day-long, spontaneous poll to determine complex content moderation decisions.
It needs to be clarified if the former president will return to Twitter. After he was de-platformed from top social media networks like Twitter, YouTube, and Facebook, Trump created his social platform called Truth Social. Trump uses Truth Social actively as one of its main selling points.
“Vote now, with positivity. But don’t be alarmed, we’re not going anywhere. Truth Social is special!” Former president Donald Trump wrote this evening on Truth Social about Musk’s tweet poll.
Truth Social launched on iOS in February. It had a glitchy launch and used uncredited code from Mastodon. As a result, the app was unable to obtain approval on Google Play for several months. According to reports, Google found many posts that violated its Play Store content policies. As a result, truth Social, Trump Media and Technology Group’s parent company, needs help completing a merger proposal to be made public via SPAC.
SensorTower data shows that approximately 3.7 million people had downloaded Truth Social as of September.
