Elon Musk gives green light to Donald Trump’s return to Twitter
Twitter’s future owner Elon Musk says the decision to ban Donald Trump permanently from the social media platform was ‘foolish in the extreme’.
Twitter’s future owner billionaire Elon Musk has given the green light to Donald Trump’s return to the social media platform, describing the decision to ban him permanently in the wake of the January 6th riots last year as “foolish in the extreme” and “morally wrong”.
Speaking at a virtual car conference hosted by the Financial Times on Tuesday (Wednesday AEST), Mr Musk said permanent bans from Twitter, whose board has accepted Mr Musk’s US$44bn offer to buy the company, should be “extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam account”.
“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,” Mr Musk, who has been a constant critic of Twitter’s censorship policies in the lead up to his April 14th offer to buy the entire company, told the conference.
Twitter – along with other social media platforms including Facebook – banned the former US president on 8th January 2021, arguing one of their most prolific users, with almost 90 million followers at the time, had breached the platform’s terms of service by encouraging the January 6th riots.
“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?” Mr Musk added in another of a series of cryptic remarks in recent days, including a tweet that read “if I die under mysterious circumstances, it’s been nice knowing you” earlier this week.
Mr Trump, who set up his own social media platform Truth Social, which has experienced mixed success in the wake of the ban, has repeatedly denied he intends to return to Twitter, as recently as 25th April, although observers suggest the Republican kingmaker and potential 2024 president candidate might not be able to resist the platform.
Republican strategists in the midst of planning for November midterm elections, in which the party is hoping to take control of Congress, have mixed feelings about the president’s return, given his tendency to attract attention not necessarily always in the interest of the broader party.
Mr Musk, one if the world’s richest men, with a fortune in excess of US$200bn, has angered left-wing activists, elements in the Democrat party and mainstream media for promising to allow all speech on the social media platform provided it is legal, calling free speech the “bedrock of a functioning democracy”.
Free speech advocates endorsed the decision.
“Numerous world leaders also condemned Twitter and Facebook for banning Trump, including many who harboured clear antipathy for Trump: including Merkel of Germany, Macron of France, various EU officials, AMLO of Mexico,” said high profile journalist Glen Greenwald.
The platform, founded by Jack Dorsey in 2006, has a longstanding policy of censoring tweets and accounts that suggest Covid-19 emerged from a Chinese lab; criticise lockdowns, masks or vaccines; allege voter fraud in the 2020 election, make jokes about the trans community, or anything the platform construes as “incitement” of violence.
Republicans have claimed the rules have been selectively applied to stamp out conservative voices. “Twitter obviously has a strong left-wing bias,” Mr Musk, who himself has over 90 million followers, tweeted earlier this week.
Mr Musk’s intention emerged after a San Francisco judge on Friday threw out a lawsuit by Donald Trump for failing to demonstrate that Twitter had breached their right to free speech under the US constitution.
Mr Trump’s lawyers had argued that Twitter had exercised a “a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate.“
The judge said the free speech rights applied “only to governmental abridgements of speech, and not to alleged abridgements by private companies”.
Justin Amish, a former Republican congressman who publicly fell out with Mr Trump, said Twitter shouldn’t “tolerate the intolerant”. “There are actual authoritarian regimes with active Twitter accounts. A better standard would be to ban any government from Twitter that restricts the freedom of speech,” he tweeted.