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Topics: Twitter, US News, Donald Trump, Elon Musk
Joe Harker
Topics: Twitter, US News, Donald Trump, Elon Musk
Elon Musk has given former US president Donald Trump his Twitter account back after holding a poll of users on the site.
Yesterday (19 November) the new Twitter boss polled people on the social media site over the question of Trump's suspension, claiming 'the most entertaining outcome is the most likely'.
Before that, Musk had reinstated a number of other banned accounts, including that of Jordan Peterson who was banned earlier this year after making transphobic comments about the actor Elliot Page.
The Twitter boss had said that a decision on returning Trump's account 'has not yet been made', so he instead launched a poll, which ended up getting over 15 million votes and narrowly chose to reinstate his account.
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Musk likely got the result he wanted, as in the build-up to him buying Twitter he'd made it clear he would undo Trump's ban if he was in charge, calling it 'morally wrong' and 'flat out stupid'.
After the results of the poll were in, Musk declared 'vox populi, vox dei', a Latin phrase meaning 'the voice of the people is the voice of god'.
His position on permanent bans is that they should be 'extremely rare' and almost exclusively used on accounts which are 'bots or spam'.
Trump was permanently banned from Twitter on 8 January, 2021 in the wake of the storming of the US capitol, where a mob of his supporters forced their way into Congress as it met to formalise the results of the 2020 election, where Trump lost to current US president Joe Biden.
Twitter said the permanent ban had been imposed 'due to the risk of further incitement of violence', coming to the decision after a 'close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them'.
While Trump might have his account back, whether he will actually return to Twitter remains to be seen.
He has not yet posted on his account and has previously insisted he would not be going back despite hoping Musk bought Twitter, saying instead that he would stick to his own social media platform, Truth Social.
Whether Twitter will still be up and running if and when Trump decides to return to the site is another question, as since Musk's takeover large numbers of staff have either been fired or walked away.
With fewer Twitter staff to maintain the site the risk of the site going down or developing bugs has increased, and many users are deciding now is the time to migrate to a new social media platform.