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The new executive director of Twitter, Elon Musk, reported that the social network restored the account of former President Donald Trump, after conducting a survey among users, in which a small majority voted in favor of that decision. However, the former president assured that he is not interested in returning to that platform. Trump, banned from Twitter for inciting violence, launched his own network in 2021: Truth
The controversial ex-president’s verified account came back online in the last few hours and quickly went from a little over 100,000 followers to 25 million, although still far from the 88 million it had before it was suspended.
“The people have spoken.” This is how the new owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, described the decision to restore the account of the former president of the United States, Donald Trump, who in recent days announced a new campaign for the presidency in 2024.
Before the decision, Musk launched a survey in which he asked users about that possibility. Among 15 million users who participated in the survey, a small majority, 51.8%, spoke in favor of restoring the service for the former head of state.
However, Musk acknowledged that the vote numbers were being affected by “bots”, automated programs that are not people, and suggested that Twitter polls needed to be “cleaned up” so that they were not influenced by “armies of bots and trolls”. .
The blue bird social network made the extraordinary decision to suspend Trump’s account on January 8, 2021, arguing incitement to violence, after the attack on the Capitol, which occurred on January 6 of that year. Day in which hundreds of supporters of the then president violently broke in at a time when legislators ratified the victory of Joe Biden, in the presidential elections of November 2020.
The ex-president has been accused for the statements he issued in videos posted on his social networks, which according to investigations led by the Democrats, motivated the attack by his followers.
The former head of state was acquitted of these accusations in political trials. However, last Friday, October 18, the US Attorney General, Merrick Garland, announced the appointment of a special prosecutor who will investigate Trump for his possible involvement in the assault on the heart of American democracy.
Trump refuses to return to Twitter
Despite the fact that in the first days of the suspension of his account he lashed out against the measure, now the least enthusiastic about the decision to rehabilitate his Twitter account is Donald Trump himself. His platform still appears with the last message he posted on January 8, 2021, the day of the suspension.
Hours before the poll announced by Musk ended, the Republican, who recently announced that he will seek to return to the Executive in the 2024 presidential elections, indicated that he had no interest in resuming the use of that platform.
“I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said, speaking on a panel at the annual leadership meeting of the Republican Jewish Coalition.
The mogul-turned-politician said he would stick with his new Truth Social platform, the app developed by his startup Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) and launched right after his suspension from Twitter.
Trump said his platform has better user engagement than Twitter and that it works “phenomenal well.” He also noted that Musk’s platform suffers from the presence of fake accounts and that the problems he was facing were “incredible.”
Experts indicate that if the former president returned to Twitter, it would raise questions about his commitment to Truth Social, which launched on the Apple App Store in February and on the Google Play Store in October. Trump has about 4.57 million followers on that network.
Trump’s response not to return to Twitter could ease concerns among major advertisers, who are already baffled by the social network’s drastic overhaul by its new CEO.
The San Francisco-based platform has halved staff and slashed the company’s trust and safety team, which is responsible for preventing the spread of misinformation and harmful content.
These actions have prompted major companies to stop advertising on the site while continuing to closely monitor how the platform handles hate speech.
On Saturday, November 19, Bloomberg reported that Twitter may lay off more employees in its sales and partnership divisions, a move that would hit the network even harder just days after a mass resignation of engineers.
With Reuters, AP and EFE
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