Will Elon Musk let Donald Trump back on Twitter now that the conservative-leaning tech titan owns the place — and would the ex-president want to come back?
Trump was permanently banned from Twitter and other mainstream internet platforms in early 2021 for supporting the Jan. 6 rioters who attacked the U.S. Capitol. On Friday, he applauded Musk’s $44 billion of takeover the company on Truth Social — the Twitter-copycat social media service that his company, Trump Media & Technology Group, launched this year after he was broadly deplatformed. Musk closed the Twitter deal Thursday (Oct. 27) and among his first actions was to fire several top execs, including CEO Parag Agrawal.
Trump said in a Truth Social post, “I am very happy that Twitter is now in sane hands, and will no longer be run by Radical Left Lunatics and Maniacs that truly hate our country. Twitter must now work hard to rid itself of all of the bots and fake accounts that have hurt it so badly. It will be much smaller, but better. I LOVE TRUTH!”
Musk has accused Twitter of a “left-wing bias” and alleged that it censors conservatives — and he has previously said he would reverse Twitter’s permanent ban on Trump, calling that a “morally bad decision.” At the same time, Musk has mocked Trump’s attempt to build a Twitter rival. “Truth Social (terrible name) exists because Twitter censored free speech,” Musktweeted on April 27. “Should be called Trumpet instead!”
Trump has previously insisted he would not rejoin Twitter, regardless of who owns it. “I am not going on Twitter. I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News in April.
All that said, Musk has sounded cautionary notes about what he will and won’t change at Twitter in terms of hate speech and misinformation. Trying to calm skittish advertisers, he wrote in an open letter Thursday that Twitter won’t become “a free-for-all hellscape, where anything can be said with no consequences.” On Friday, Musk tweeted another promise, saying that Twitter will be “forming a content moderation council with widely diverse viewpoints” and that “No major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes.”
Meanwhile, in May, Devin Nunes, the former GOP congressman who is now CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group, claimed that Trump “encouraged” Musk to acquire Twitter to “take on these tech tyrants.” Musk said that was false: “I’ve had no communication, directly or indirectly, with Trump, who has publicly stated that he will be exclusively on Truth Social,” Musktweeted at the time.
Meanwhile, Trump, in his statement Friday cheering Musk’s Twitter acquisition, also confusingly claimed that Truth Social last week “had bigger numbers than all other platforms, including TikTok, Twitter, Facebook, and the rest.” It’s not clear what the former president meant; Facebook alone has nearly 2 billion daily active users.
Truth Social launched initially on Apple’s iOS in February 2022. The app was blocked by Google’s Play Store over what the internet giant said were violations of the app store’s policies that prohibit apps from hosting content like physical threats and incitement to violence. Earlier this month, Google approved the Android version of Truth Social after receiving assurances from TMTG that it will comply with Google Play content-moderation requirements.
