Voice of London

Elon Musk reinstated Donald Trump’s Twitter account on Saturday night, following a public opinion poll. The former president has been banned from the social media site since 6 January 2021, after the siege of the Capitol.

The new owner of Twitter has previously stated that he considers Trump’s ban from the site a mistake, and just three and a half weeks after buying the platform, he already reinstated the former president’s profile.

Before restoring the account, Musk posted a poll on his own Twitter account asking his followers whether the former president should be allowed to return. More than 15 million people voted by the Saturday evening deadline, and those supporting Trump’s return won with a close 51.8 per cent. Minutes after the polls closed, Musk announced, “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei.”

Trump has done a lot to make Twitter one of the most influential mediums in the world. Unlike his predecessors, he even made official presidential announcements through the application on several occasions, instead of press releases, press briefings, or TV speeches. Between 2009 and 2021, he posted a total of 56,571 times on the social media site.

Why did Trump got banned?

Donald Trump’s Twitter account, which has nearly 90 million followers, was first suspended for 12 hours after the siege of the Capitol on 6 January 2021 and then permanently on 8 January. According to the platform’s moderators, he violated the site’s rules with several posts and risked “further incitement of violence“.

After the 2020 presidential election, Trump refused to accept that he lost to Democratic candidate Joe Biden. He claimed that Democrats rigged the election, which resulted in his supporters besieging the US legislative building, the Capitol, on 6 January 2021. During the attack, five people were killed, and more than a hundred were injured. 

Will Trump return to Twitter?

After Trump was banned from Twitter (and Facebook), the social networking site Parler became a gathering place for his supporters, but the ex-president himself did not register on the site. Instead, in February this year, he launched his own social media site, Truth Social, where he started posting again with the vehemence typical of his Twitter days.

In an interview with Fox News in late October, he declined to answer a question regarding whether he would return Twitter again if Musk allowed him back on the platform.

However, he previously hinted that if he decides to run for presidency in 2024, which he confirmed on Tuesday evening, Truth Social would be his main platform during the campaign.

“If I choose to run, I will only use Truth,” – he said. “When I put out a Truth, it is all over the place.”

According to the Washington Post, the former president told his confidants he could not leave Truth Social because the social site would collapse without his active presence. The app is owned by the Trump Media & Technology Group, and if he were to go back to Twitter, it’s hard to see how the site could continue. Investors started leaving since the platform missed a critical deadline to go public, and stakeholders have already backed out of $139 million in commitments of the $1 billion previously announced.

Total chaos on Twitter

After months of struggles, Elon Musk officially bought the social platform on 27 October and almost immediately started to reshape the site. As one of his first actions, he fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 employees. Then, on Thursday, he gave the remaining workers an ultimatum – they either join Twitter 2.0, which will require “extremely hardcore” work and lots of overtime, or leave the company. Not surprisingly, at least another 1,200 people left the company, which means Twitter lost two-thirds of its employees within a few weeks, bringing the platform close to a shutdown.

Words: Andrea Rezman | Subbing: Anna Kamocsai