Following a poll conducted by Twitter’s new owner Elon Musk, in which users on the social media network narrowly decided to overturn a ban imposed on the former US president more than a year ago, Twitter has now restored Donald Trump’s account. Musk acknowledged that automated bots were influencing the results of the user poll, yet the account restoration still happened.
Despite Musk’s earlier assertion that the business will create a content moderation council and “no major content decisions or account reinstatements will happen before that council convenes,” Trump was re-platformed on Twitter via a user poll. It is still unknown if the council has been established.
Rapper Kanye West, who was barred from the website for making antisemitic remarks, also had his account reopened about the same time that Musk gained control of Twitter in October.
Since Trump’s posts were “very likely to encourage and inspire people to mimic the criminal activities that took place at the US Capitol,” Twitter banned him after the attack on the US Capitol on January 6, 2017. After the riot, he was also expelled from YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Trump had urged his followers to “fight like hell” on Twitter.
It was an abrupt change from the tech industry’s previous stance on Trump and other political figures, which had mostly been one of mutually beneficial cooperation. According to Professor Ramesh Srinivasan of the Department of Information Studies at UCLA, the majority of these businesses survive on the amplification of spectacle.
Trump nearly daily produced the show, giving social media sites like Twitter the ability to amplify it for guaranteed attention. Twitter and Facebook plainly acted in response to mounting calls for coercive action against them for allowing the President to spread misinformation and hatred on their platforms during his administration by banning him.
Musk created a Twitter poll on Saturday, November 19, asking if Trump’s account should be reactivated. Over 15 million people responded to the poll, and a narrow majority (51.8%) of them agreed that his account should be reinstated. But it’s important to remember that, according to Musk, over 134 million people saw the poll, which means that only approximately 11% of them took part.
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