Musk Says He Would Lift Trump's Twitter Ban
17:48 GMT 10.05.2022 (Updated: 13:01 GMT 14.04.2023)
© AP Photo / Joe Maiorana
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Trump was permanently banned from the platform in January 2021 following the attack by his supporters on the US Capitol.
Elon Musk, who recently bought the micro-blogging platform Twitter for $44 billion, said he would reverse Twitter’s ban on former President Donald Trump if his acquisition is completed.
“Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam 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...I would reverse the permanent ban”, Musk said at the FT Live Future of the Car conference.
“I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don’t own Twitter?” he added.
Shortly after news broke of the development, Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey remarked on the social media platform that he agreed with Musk's decision. "I do agree," he said, adding that "there are exceptions."
I do agree. There are exceptions (CSE, illegal behaviour, spam or network manipulation, etc), but generally permanent bans are a failure of ours and don't work, which I wrote about here after the event (and called for a resilient social media protocol): https://t.co/fQ9KnrCQGX
— jack⚡️ (@jack) May 10, 2022
In the meantime, the former US president said last month that he would not return to Twitter even if Musk reverses the ban.
“I was disappointed by the way I was treated by Twitter. I won’t be going back on Twitter”, the former president said in an interview with CNBC last.
Trump, who used to have over 80 million followers on Twitter, was permanently suspended from the platform in January 2021 following the attack of a mob of his supporters on the US Capitol while lawmakers were about to certify the official results of the presidential election, which saw Trump defeated by his Democratic rival Joe Biden. Twitter said it decided to ban Trump "due to the risk of further incitement of violence".
On 25 April, Twitter announced that it had "agreed to be acquired by an entity wholly owned by Elon Musk", for $44 billion. On 13 April, Musk who had bought 9.2 percent shares in Twitter said he was ready to offer $43 billion to take the company private and to “transform” it as a “platform for free speech around the globe”.
