On Saturday night, Trump’s account repopulated with old tweets and followers, though the former president did not tweet immediately after his recovery. He said Saturday that he remained focused on his Twitter clone, Truth Social, saying he would not be returning to the site immediately.
According to Musk’s unscientific and unrepresentative Twitter poll, Twitter users voted roughly 52% to 48% in favor of reinstating Trump’s account.Musk has a good multiple key decisions His Twitter feed votes, including whether to sell 10% of Tesla stock in the last year.
Musk has previously said he disagrees with the ban and intends to reinstate Trump. But after his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter late last month, he also promised to set up a content review board to make such decisions — a process he said could take weeks.
Trump had more than 88 million followers before he was suspended from Twitter after Jan. 1. Feb. 6, 2021, citing fears of incitement to violence in the days after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol and sparked riots, killing five and injuring hundreds.
A former Twitter employee familiar with the account recovery process, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, said it can take up to a full day for a banned account to return to its previous state.
Musk’s move, minutes after his poll closed, reversed one of the most important decisions in Twitter’s history. Musk, a self-described “free speech absolutist,” has said the permanent ban undermines Twitter’s role as a haven for unfettered free speech.
The decision drew immediate criticism from the NAACP, which urged advertisers to suspend all promotions on the platform Saturday night.
“In Elon Musk’s Twittersphere, you can foment an uprising at the U.S. Capitol, resulting in multiple deaths, and still deliver hate speech and violent plots on his platform,” it said in a statement. “God help us all if Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using crap polls that don’t represent the needs of the American people and our democracy.”
second He tweeted later in the day the $44 billion acquisition closedMusk promised not to make Twitter “a hell of dogfights,” saying he bought the platform “because it’s important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square where beliefs can be debated in a healthy way.” way, without resorting to violence.”
People on the right — including former members of the Trump administration and politicians aligned with the former president — celebrated Musk’s decision, welcoming Trump back to the platform Saturday night.
Trump addressed Musk’s polling and his account themes in a video link address Saturday at the Republican Jewish Coalition conference in Las Vegas.
He was lukewarm at the prospect of rejoining the site, repeating previous remarks that he would rather focus on his clone site, Truth Social.
“I don’t see any reason to do that,” Trump said of his return to Twitter, alluding to the social media network’s reported bot problems and declining engagement. “Truth Social has taken over a lot of people, and I don’t think they’re going to come back to Twitter.”
While Trump took the opportunity to promote his website, he said he appreciated the polls and welcomed Musk’s purchase.
“I love that he bought it, I’ve always loved him,” Trump said. “He’s a character, but I’m more of a character.”
If he returns, Trump’s reinstatement early in the 2024 presidential campaign could once again cement the platform’s status as a polarizing political battleground.
Trump has used Twitter to great effect, seizing the news cycle and destroying opponents — not only in the years leading up to his presidency, but during the campaign, and later in the White House.
Although Trump has said he would not rejoin Twitter even if asked, some of his advisers told The Washington Post this spring that they doubted his commitment. Twitter is Trump’s primary megaphone, allowing him to reach an audience of tens of millions of followers through dozens of messages a day.
In Trump’s contract with Truth Social, he agreed that he would publish his posts exclusively on Truth Social for eight hours before he could share them elsewhere, the Post reported. The agreement provides exceptions for “political messaging, political fundraising or vote-seeking efforts,” which he can conduct whenever and wherever he wants.
Researchers and activists have argued that reinstating Trump would embolden rule-breakers and disable Twitter’s most powerful tool for reducing harassment and lies: suspending someone’s account.
That would “open the floodgates for incredibly unsavory behavior,” said Joan Donovan, research director of disinformation at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center for Media, Politics and Public Policy.
She said Trump’s reinstatement would not only help the former president drive the public conversation, but also affect the outlet that is most popular with journalists and news lovers. It would also help centralize political outrage campaigns scattered in smaller right-wing corners of the network.
“This brings us back to 2020, Trump understands that what he says in public and on Twitter has the power to create mass hysteria,” she said. “The people he mobilized are not leaving. They feel as strongly as ever that something is rotten in the government and they need a real savior.”
Trump will rejoin a Twitter that looks very different from the one he sent his first tweet in 2009, urging people to watch his brief appearance on “The Late Show with David Letterman.”
Unlike his first time on Twitter, his audience will probably know what to expect from him. Whether he can recapture old audiences remains to be seen.
After his Twitter ban, Trump began posting on a widely ignored blog, which he abandoned after 29 days due to low readership.
Trump later signed on with a small group of co-founders to create a Twitter clone, Truth Social, which launched earlier this year and promised to become a “media powerhouse.”
But Trump has only 4 million followers on the site, and his posts on the site receive only a fraction of the engagement and replies he had previously received on Twitter. Trump Media Technologies Group, the start-up that runs it, has also been marred by bitter infighting, federal investigations and growing investor unease.
Some critics expect Trump’s resurgence on Twitter could further weaken Truth Social, which has seen Trump’s involvement as key to its increasingly crowded market of right-wing social networks, meme pages and message boards differentiator.
Trump had promised exclusive access to Truth Social, taking 90 percent ownership of the startup. Shares of its investment partner Digital World Acquisition fell to near record lows on Thursday amid concerns over Trump’s Twitter return.
On Truth Social, Trump continues to lie about widespread election fraud and share QAnon-related conspiracy theories that suggest Trump is leading a covert campaign against a global cabal of child-eating Satanists .
“He’s been dog-whistling QAnon on Truth Social, hoping to get mainstream media attention, and just sending out all these conspiracy beacons to get momentum and energy around his name,” Donovan said. “But there’s nothing new about it. A lot depends on how long he’s willing to spend … getting attention.”