Elon Musk restored the Twitter account of former president Trump on Saturday, a pivotal move that could help the platform’s once loudest, bluntest force regain online attention just as a new presidential election begins.
Elon Musk restores Trump’s Twitter account
Trump’s account was repopulating with old tweets and followers on Saturday night, though the former president had not tweeted immediately after being restored. He said Saturday he remained focused on his Twitter clone Truth Social, signaling he would not return to the site right away.
Twitter users voted roughly 52 percent to 48 percent to restore Trump’s account, according to Musk’s poll. Musk has put multiple pivotal decisions up to a vote from his Twitter feed, including, last year, on whether to sell 10 percent of his Tesla stock.
Musk had previously said he disagreed with the ban and intended to restore Trump. But after purchasing Twitter for $44 billion late last month, he had also promised to install a content moderation council to make such devisions — saying they would likely take weeks.
Trump had more than 88 million followers before Twitter suspended him after Jan. 6, 2021, citing fears of violent incitement in the days after his supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in riots that left five dead and hundreds injured.
A former Twitter employee familiar with the process of account restoration, speaking on the condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, said banned accounts can take up to a full day to be restored to their prior state.
Musk’s move, minutes after the conclusion of his poll, reversed one of the most consequential decisions in Twitter’s history. A self-described “free speech absolutist,” Musk has said permanent bans undermine Twitter’s role as an unrestricted haven for free expression.
In a tweeted letter the day he completed his $44 billion acquisition, Musk pledged not to make Twitter “a free-for-all hellscape” and said he bought the platform “because it is important to the future of civilization to have a common digital town square, where a wide range of beliefs can be debated in a healthy manner, without resorting to violence.”
Still, the former president has indicated he would not rush back to Twitter. Trump addressed Musk’s poll and the subject of his account during video-link remarks to the Republican Jewish Coalition conference on Saturday in Las Vegas.
He reacted coolly to the prospect of rejoining the site, reiterating previous remarks that he would rather focus his attention on his clone website Truth Social.
“I don’t see any reason for it,” Trump said of returning to Twitter, alluding to the social media network’s reported problems with bots and declining engagement. “Truth Social has taken the place for a lot of people and I don’t see them going back onto Twitter.”
While Trump took the opportunity to promote his own website, he said he appreciated the poll and welcome Musk’s purchase.
“I like that he bought it, I’ve always liked him,” Trump said. “He’s a character, but I tend to like characters.”
If he returns, Trump’s reinstatement at the dawn of the 2024 presidential race could cement the platform again as a hyperpolarized political battleground.
Trump had used Twitter to great effect to grip the news cycle and tear down opponents — not only in the years before running for president but on the campaign trail and, later, in the White House.
Though Trump has said he wouldn’t rejoin Twitter even if he was asked, some of his advisers told The Washington Post this spring that they doubted his commitment. Twitter was Trump’s most dominant megaphone and allowed him to reach an audience of tens of millions of followers with dozens of messages a day.
Researchers and activists have argued that reinstating Trump will embolden rule-breakers and neutralize Twitter’s most potent tool for reducing harassment and lies: suspending someone’s account.
This will “open up the floodgates to incredibly obnoxious behavior,” said Joan Donovan, a research director of Harvard’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy who has studied disinformation.
Trump’s reinstatement, she said, will not only help the former president drive the public conversation and influence the most popular medium for journalists and news junkies. It will also help centralize a political outrage movement that has scattered across smaller right-wing corners of the web.
“This brings us back to 2020, where Trump understands the power that what he says in public and on Twitter can create mass hysteria,” she said. “The people he’s mobilizing have not gone away. They feel as strongly as ever that something is rotten in the government, and they need an actual savior.”
Trump will rejoin a Twitter that looks very different from what it did when he sent his first tweet, in 2009, to urge people to watch his brief appearance on “Late Night With David Letterman.”
Unlike his first time on Twitter, his audience will likely know what to expect from him.
Source: WP
