On Saturday, Elon Musk’s poll found that the majority of respondents wanted Donald Trump to be unbanned, leading to the restoration of his Twitter account. The former US president said he didn’t have any imminent plans to return to the social media site, though. In total, 51.8% of the more than 15 million participants in the survey, which simply asked, “Reinstate former President Trump,” chose to do so.
In another tweet, Twitter’s new owner wrote, “Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” which means the voice of the people is the voice of God.
Whether Mr Trump should be allowed back on Twitter has been a topic of ferocious debate since he was banned after the January 6, 2021 mob attack on the US Capitol for allegedly inciting violence.
But the conversation over the extent to which free speech should be protected even if it leads to violence appeared to be moot for the moment in Mr Trump’s case, as he indicated he would not jump back on to Twitter.
The former president, who is the subject of several legal investigationspreviously had more than 88 million followers and would tirelessly tweet everything from policy announcements to attacks on his rivals.
“I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said when asked whether he planned to return to Twitter by a panel at the Republican Jewish Coalition’s annual leadership meeting.
He said he would stick with his new platform Truth Social, the app developed by his own start-up, which he said had better user engagement than Twitter and was doing “phenomenally well”.
Mr Musk reinstated Mr Trump’s account moments after the poll closed. A scroll through the former president’s final tweets before he was banned show how aggressively he was pushing his baseless claims of voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election.
Those claims have been blamed for helping foment the violence on January 6.
Mr Trump, who on Tuesday launched a bid to regain the White House in 2024, praised Mr Musk and said he had always liked the world’s richest man.
Mr Trump also said Twitter suffered from bots, fake accounts and that the problems it faced were “incredible”.
But how long the attention-craving former president will be able to resist the platform and its enormous bullhorn as he campaigns for the White House remains to be seen.
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