Tesla and new Twitter owner, Elon Musk, has said he would reverse the ban slammed on former US President Donald Trump. This does not come as a surprise as Musk’s body language ever since he was announced as the new owner of Twitter has pointed in that direction.
In an event hosted by the Financial Times, Musk said
“I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake,” Musk told the Financial Times per the Washington Post. “It alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice.”
Continuing, Musk described the ban as “a morally bad decision, and foolish in the extreme.”
Recall that Twitter banned Trump shortly after a group of the former president’s supporters invaded the US Capitol in January, 2021. While announcing the ban, Twitter cited “risk of further incitement of violence.”
Trump, a regular and power voice before the ban was announced, has not confirmed if he would like to return to the platform. Twitter offers him a wider reach compared to his Truth Social platform where he only has about 2 million followers.
Jack Dorsey, former Twitter CEO, has said he is not a supporter of a permanent Twitter ban for users. Dorsey said this shortly after it was announced that the platform which he co-founded has been bought by Tesla owner Elon Musk.
“As I’ve said before, I don’t believe any permanent ban (with the exception of illegal activity) is right, or should be possible. This is why we need a protocol that’s resilient to the layers above,” said Dorsey in a Tweet.
His statement easily recalls the permanent ban placed on former US President Donald Trump.
“Some things can be fixed immediately, and others require rethinking and reimplementing the entire system. It is important to me that we get critical feedback in all of its forms, but also important that we get the space and time to address it. All of that should be done publicly,” Dorsey added.
Earlier in the year, Twitter announced that it had permanently banned the account of Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s personal account. Twitter said per The New York Times that Greene’s account was suspended for violating the company’s COVID-19 misinformation policies.
In the controversial tweet that got Greene’s account suspended, she tweeted falsely about “extremely high amounts of Covid vaccine deaths.” She also added a misleading chart that pulled information from a government database of unverified raw data called the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System, or VAERS. For the record, the VAERS contains a decade-old system that relies on self-reported cases from patients and health care officials.
