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After conducting a poll among his followers, Elon Musk reinstated the account of the former President of the United States, Donald Trump. Among the 15 million or so Musk’s followers who voted in the poll, about 52 percent favored the reinstatement. However, it seems that Trump isn’t interested in returning to the platform.
Trump’s Twitter account had over 88 million followers before he was banned on January 8, 2021, for the Capitol Hill Riots and the insurrection of January 6, 2021. After the ban was lifted, Trump’s Tweets were restored, but not his followers. However, Trump’s account began accumulating followers and had nearly 100,000 followers by 8:30 AM Monday.
Speaking at a panel at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting, the former US president said he isn’t keen to return to the platform, saying, “I don’t see any reason for it.”
Trump said he would continue using his own social media platform, Truth Social. The platform, a right-leaning version of Twitter, was developed by Donald Trump and his team at the Trump Media & Technology Group.
Trump said that he had better user engagement than Twitter on Truth Social and that the platform was doing “phenomenally well.”
Truth Social has been Trump’s main direct communication line with his followers since he began posting on the app regularly in May. Over the years, Trump has used Truth Social to promote his allies, criticize opponents and defend his reputation amid legal scrutiny from state, congressional and federal investigators. He has over 4.5 million followers on the platform.
Trump also said that although he always liked Musk and praised him for reinstating his account, he also noted that Twitter suffered from bots and fake accounts and that the problems it faced were “incredible.”
Trump’s refusal to rejoin Twitter must be a significant relief to advertisers. One of the biggest fears that most brands and advertisers on Twitter had was that Musk would reverse the ban on specific controversial figures, including Trump, who recently launched his bid to run for the US Presidency again in 2024.
When Musk took control of Twitter, he reassured users and advertisers that any decision regarding reinstating banned accounts would be made with consideration by a content moderation council composed of people with “widely diverse viewpoints” and no account reinstatements would happen before the panel convened.
Interestingly, Musk fired a significant chunk of content moderators when he terminated half of Twitter’s employees and fired more than 4000 contractual content moderators. There has been no new information about the process or the moderation council.
