One of the questions about Elon Musk’s pending purchase of Twitter is what will happen to Donald Trump. The former president’s account was banned on January 8, 2021, “because of the risk of further incitement to violence”, while Jack Dorsey remained the CEO of the company. During an interview conducted remotely during the Financial Times’ car future conference and streamed live on YouTubethe current CEO of Tesla and SpaceX responded to a direct question about the ban and what will happen when he owns Twitter.
With the caveat that “I don’t own Twitter yet, so this is definitely not something that’s going to happen,” Musk said, “I guess the answer is I, I would revert permaban,” citing a shared message. opinion with his texting partner Dorsey that permabans shouldn’t exist except for bots and spam.
I spoke to Jack Dorsey about this and he and I agree that permanent bans should be extremely rare and we reserve [them] for accounts that are bots or spam/scam accounts, where there is no legitimacy to be held accountable.
I think it was wrong to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake, because it alienated much of the country and it ultimately didn’t result in Donald Trump having no voice, now he’s going to be on Truth Social as much of the right wing will be in the United States. , so I think this could end up being frankly worse than having a single forum where everyone can debate. So I guess the answer is that it would reverse the permaban, obviously I don’t have Twitter yet, so it’s definitely not going to happen, because what if I don’t have Twitter? But my opinion and Jack Dorsey, to be clear, shares this opinion that we shouldn’t have permabans.
As he went on to explain more, he says his view is that the ban was a mistake as it “alienated a large part of the country and did not result in Donald Trump having no voice.” As he put it, it’s “frankly worse” for Trump to move to his own app, Truth Social. Musk closed his response by noting that, at least so far, Trump claims he will only use his own app and won’t go back to “boring” Twitter absolutely.