Three weeks after purchasing the social media company for $44 billion, Elon Musk announced that he would restore former President Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday night. This announcement came shortly after millions of accounts answered “ yes ” to a poll that Musk had posted on Friday night, voting in favor of the decision by a majority of 52% out of more than 15 million total votes.
Musk stated in a tweet, “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated.“
Why this matters: During his campaign for president and after he was elected, Donald Trump relied heavily on Twitter as his primary means of communication.
On Tuesday night, Trump kicked off his campaign for reelection in 2024, after having been impeached twice and being the subject of a criminal investigation. As of right now, an FEC committee is deciding whether or not to ban Trump from running for office again.
Musk has stated that permanent bans (on Twitter) should be extremely rare (he recently implemented them for users who impersonate others), and that Trump’s suspension was “a mistake” and “foolish.” On Friday, Musk announced that Kathy Griffin, Jordan Peterson, and Babylon Bee were reinstated and that a decision hadn’t been made yet about Trump’s account. He then decided to conduct a poll regarding Trump’s reinstatement, calling the action a part of ‘Freedom Fridays”
The big picture: Two days after the uprising on January 6 at the United States Capitol, Twitter permanently suspended Trump’s account in what it said was a response to the “risk of further inciting of violence.”
One day later, Facebook removed Trump from its platform indefinitely; however, the company later lowered the duration of its ban to two years.
At the beginning of this year, President Trump introduced a Twitter imitation that he calls Truth Social. However, after an initial surge in user numbers, the social media platform has struggled to maintain its user base, and federal investigators are looking into the platform’s failed merger with a blank check acquisition company (SPAC).
Take a look ahead: If he is reinstated, Donald Trump has stated that he won’t use Twitter, and when he formed Truth Social, he agreed to some restrictions on his use of the platform.
