In a move that stemmed from a Twitter poll in which 52% of respondents said former President Donald Trump’s account should be reinstated, the Don is back on the platform. Or, is he?
Technically, his account, @realDonaldTrump is now alive and findable again. The big question is whether Trump himself will actually take up the reigns and begin posting original Tweets. After all, Trump is heavily invested in Truth Social and also somewhat under financial obligation to keep propping up the platform. The plain truth is that if Trump abandons Truth Social, the platform would likely fade into cyberspace.
Nonetheless, the door is now open again for Trump to send his first Tweet after reinstatement. Will he do it?
The account, which Twitter banned following the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, was restored after Twitter CEO and new owner Elon Musk posted a poll on Twitter on Friday night asking the platform’s users if Trump should be reinstated.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted Saturday night. “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Latin for “the voice of the people is the voice of God.”
The final poll results on Saturday night showed 51.8% in favor and 48.2% opposed. The poll included 15 million votes.
The much-anticipated decision from the new owner sets the stage for the former president’s return to the social media platform, where he was previously its most influential, if controversial, user. With almost 90 million followers, his tweets often moved the markets, set the news cycle and drove the agenda in Washington.
Recent talk of Twitter’s demise under Elon Musk is shortsighted and oversold. While Musk curbs the Twitter workforce and cuts the woke fat from the payroll, mainstream media outlets are writing the site’s epitaph. For some reason, it’s believed that a man who is NASA’s chief partner for sending rockets into space and responsible for designing the world’s best-selling electric vehicle will have difficulty operating a successful internet social media platform. It’s not rocket science, after all, it’s merely software.
There’s no doubt that with every move of undoing Twitter’s previous policies of banning any right-of-center views its liberal workforce didn’t like, more and more users are returning to the platform. If Trump actually decides to take up his account again and start sending original content, Musk will sell a lot of $8 blue checkmarks for newly verified accounts.
Twitter cannot survive on advertising revenue alone as it gives advertisers too much power to regulate speech on the platform. It has to be self-funded and there are many ways to try and achieve that. The more open and useful the platform is to all political stripes, the more likely it will be that Musk can find a sustainable business model that doesn’t let JP Morgan or Disney dictate the platform’s censorship policies.
So, while the move to let Donald Trump back on is considered “controversial,” even former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey agreed that a permanent ban on the 45th President was a bridge too far:
Jack Dorsey, who was the CEO of Twitter when the company banned Trump but has since left, responded to Musk’s comments saying he agreed that there should not be permanent bans. Banning the former president, he said, was a “business decision” and it “shouldn’t have been.”
So, will Trump send his first Tweet since his ban back in January of 2021 anytime soon? That remains to be seen, but a lot of journalists and Twitter users will be watching with bated breath.
What would a presidential election be without Trump’s daily Twitter stream of consciousness driving the morning news cycle?
