Recent Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk announced that he’ll reinstate the Twitter account of former President Donald Trump on Saturday.
Musk ran a straw poll on the social media platform starting late Friday asking his followers to vote on whether to reinstate former U.S. President Donald Trump’s account on the platform. The poll ran for twenty 4 hours.
At its conclusion, Musk wrote in a tweet, “The people have spoken. Trump will probably be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.” The latter phrase means “the voice of the people is the voice of god.”
Trump’s account gave the impression to be live to tell the tale Twitter, but the previous president had not issued any latest posts to the social media platform immediately after Musk removed the ban.
Under previous ownership, Twitter had issued a lifetime ban on President Donald Trump’s account in January 2021.
The previous president’s account was first suspended by Twitter within the wake of the January 6, 2021, riot on the U.S. Capitol where his supporters rioted and disrupted lawmakers who were formally counting Electoral College votes.
On the time, Twitter said in a tweet, it made the choice “as a result of the danger of further incitement of violence.”
Once Trump was banned from Twitter, and other social platforms including Facebook, he formed a social media company of his own.
For his part, Trump said earlier this 12 months that he wouldn’t return to the social media platform even when Musk reversed the ban.
The previous president told CNBC’s Joe Kernen in April after news of the deal that though he likes Musk, he was “dissatisfied by the best way I used to be treated by Twitter. I won’t be going back on Twitter.”
Musk had foreshadowed his decision to welcome Trump back onto the platform back in May, shortly after he first agreed to purchase the corporate. At FT Live’s Way forward for the Automotive conference, Musk said he “would reverse the everlasting ban” if the deal went through.
“Everlasting bans needs to be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts which are bots, or scam, spam accounts… I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump,” Musk said on the time. “I believe that was a mistake, since it alienated a big a part of the country and didn’t ultimately end in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
The move to bring Trump back to Twitter comes days after the previous president announced his third campaign for the White House. Trump is currently under federal investigation for his handling of classified documents and his role in an enormous effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election results.
Trump’s account being reactivated arrives weeks before the December runoff election between Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., and Republican candidate Herschel Walker. Trump’s activity on Twitter could impact the race.
Conservative radio host Erick Erickson tweeted, “There goes Georgia,” in response to the news. Erickson looked as if it would suggest that Trump would damage Walker’s probabilities along with his prospective tweets.
Trump has applauded Twitter’s latest ownership under Musk. “I’m very pleased that Twitter is now in sane hands, and can now not be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that really hate our country,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social account in October. Truth Social is a Twitter-like platform run by the Trump Media & Technology Group.
On Oct. 28, as Musk was taking the helm at Twitter, he wrote on the platform that, “Twitter will probably be forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints. No major content decisions or account reinstatements will occur before that council convenes.”
Musk has not yet said whether he has formed a content moderation council or who’s participating in it.
The NAACP was certainly one of the primary civil rights groups to sentence Musk for allowing Trump back onto the platform. Derrick Johnson, the CEO of the NAACP, called on any firms still working with Twitter to pause their promoting following the choice to reinstate Trump.
“Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all promoting,” Johnson said in an announcement to CNBC. “If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that don’t represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all,” he added.
Johnson was amongst a gaggle of civil rights leaders who recently met with Musk and called on him to disallow the return of many users that had been banned from the platform.
Democratic leaders have concerned for months that Musk would allow Trump to return to Twitter.
Members of President Joe Biden’s inner circle and party strategists were nervous that misinformation will rise on Twitter under Musk’s leadership and ahead of the 2024 presidential election, which could pit Biden against the previous president in a rematch, CNBC previously reported.
A White House spokesman didn’t return a request for comment.
