Elon Musk asks Twitter to vote on whether he should reinstate Donald Trump

Elon Musk has made the controversial decision to allow Twitter users to vote on the reinstatement of former President Donald Trump.

The politician, now 76, was previously permanently banned from the platform in January 2021 because of the 'risk of further incitement of violence' after the Capitol Riots on 6 January that year.

Since then, Trump has made the views he previously shared on Twitter known on his own social media platform, Truth Social, but this could all be about to change following Musk's poll.

The tech entrepreneur, 51, asked Twitter users on 19 November: 'Reinstate former President Trump', followed by the option to vote yes or no.

Unsurprisingly, this question has garnered a huge amount of attention as it comes just days after Trump announced his 2024 US presidential bid.

At the time of writing, almost eight million people had voted in the poll, which currently states that 52.9 percent of Twitter users want Trump reinstated and 47.1 percent want the ban to be upheld after Musk's recent purchase of the platform.

Twitter/@elonmusk

The former president is not the only previously banned user who Musk is considering allowing back onto the platform, and he has already lifted the ban on Andrew Tate, 35, who faced a five-year ban after criticising the MeToo movement back in 2017.

Musk reinstated the controversial media personality along with Kathy Griffin, Jordan Peterson and the Babylon Bee as part of his promised commitment to 'free speech' on the platform.

On his return, Tate tweeted: "Mastery is a funny thing. It's almost as if, on a long enough time scale, losing simply isn't an option."

However, the reinstatement of Trump will arguably be the most significant should it happen, with Musk telling people prior to the poll that no decision had been made on the matter 'yet'.

Musk appeared pleased with the popularity of his poll about the former president and later tweeted: "Trump poll getting ~1M votes/hour."

Alamy / The Photo Access

As reported by Sky News, Musk previously said of Trump's permanent ban from Twitter: "Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots or spam, scam accounts. I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump.

"I think that was a mistake because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."

At the time of his suspension, Trump had over 80 million followers on Twitter.