Twitter lifts Donald Trump ban after Elon Musk’s poll
Elon Musk has announced the reinstatement of Donald Trump’s Twitter account after users on the social media platform voted by a slim majority to lift a ban on the former US president.
Trump’s account was suspended in 2021 after the 6 January Capitol riot for violating Twitter guidelines and the risk of “further incitement of violence”.
Musk, Twitter’s new owner, announced the move after a poll on his own account, in which more than 15m votes were cast, with 51.8% in favour of reinstatement.
Shortly after taking over Twitter last month, the Tesla CEO had said that no decisions would be taken on reinstatement until a newly announced “content moderation council” had met, later adding that no bans would be lifted until there was a “clear process for doing so”.
During the poll, Musk acknowledged that the vote numbers were being affected by automated “bots”, which are not operated by people, and suggested there was a need to “clean up” Twitter polls from being influenced by “bot and troll armies”.
Trump’s @realDonaldTrump account appeared to be live on Sunday, although the former president had yet to post to the more than 50 million users following his account. His last tweet was on 8 January 2021, in which he declared that he would not attend Joe Biden’s inauguration as 46th president of the US.
Trump did not appear keen to return to Twitter when discussing the issue on Saturday. “I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said via video when asked about it by a panel at the Republican Jewish Coa
lition’s annual leadership meeting.
He said he would stick with his new platform Truth Social, the app developed by his Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) startup.
Twitter banned Trump after the 6 January attack last year, saying his posts were “highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol”. Trump was also banned from Facebook, Instagram and YouTube in the wake of the riot.
Last week, Trump announced his candidacy for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024 and praised Musk, saying he had always liked him. However, Trump also said Twitter suffered from bots and fake accounts, and that the problems it faced were “incredible”.
The National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), a leading US civil rights organisation, urged all advertisers still funding the platform to immediately pause their spending after Trump’s reinstatement.
“Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising. If Elon Musk continues to run Twitter like this, using garbage polls that do not represent the American people and the needs of our democracy, God help us all,” said the NAACP’s president, Derrick Johnson.
Musk admitted this month that Twitter, which relies on ads for 90% of its revenue, had suffered a “massive drop in revenue” after advertisers stopped booking space on the platform because of concerns that content guidelines would be relaxed.
Advertisers were also concerned by the botched relaunch of Twitter’s subscription service, Twitter Blue, after impersonators jumped on the offer to be “verified” by simply paying $7.99 (£7) a month. Omnicom, a media agency whose clients include McDonald’s, Apple and Pepsi, has told companies to pause their Twitter spending because of concerns over “brand safety”.
Yoel Roth, the former head of trust and safety at Twitter who resigned after the takeover, said in a New York Times op-ed that he quit because it was clear Musk would have unilateral control of content policies. “A Twitter whose policies are defined by unilateral edict has little need for a trust and safety function dedicated to its principled development,” Roth wrote.
Musk, a self-described “free-speech absolutist”, first mooted the reinstatement of Trump in May after agreeing a $44bn (£37bn) deal to buy Twitter. He said: “I would reverse the permanent ban,” adding that Twitter was “left-biased”.
This week, Musk reinstated the comedian Kathy Griffin, who had been banned for changing her profile name to “Elon Musk”, which violated his new rule against impersonation without indicating it was a parody account. He has also reinstated Jordan Peterson, the Canadian psychologist and author, who was suspended from Twitter after violating the platform’s content policies with a tweet about the transgender actor Elliot Page.
On Friday, Musk announced a new content policy of “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach”, stating that “negative/hate” tweets would be “deboosted” and no adverts would appear near them.
Also on Friday, Twitter temporarily closed its offices after an unspecified number of staff quit the company in the wake of an ultimatum from Musk that they commit to “being hardcore” or leave. According to the New York Times, 1,200 of Twitter’s remaining 3,750 workers – a workforce that had already been halved in size after Musk’s takeover – left the business last week.