A few days after former US President Donald Trump‘s account was reinstated following a Twitter poll, Elon Musk held another “general amnesty” poll. Twitter’s new owner ran a poll asking users whether all suspended accounts that “have not broken the law or engaged in heinous spam” should be reinstated. “Should Twitter offer blanket amnesty to suspended accounts, provided they haven’t broken the law or engaged in heinous spam?” asked the tech billionaire with the option to vote yes or no.
The results of the survey, which has a 24-hour window, will be released on November 25, 2022 at around 11:16 PM IST. Earlier, Musk conducted an online poll asking Twitter users whether Trump’s account should be reinstated on the microblogging platform. In the poll, which received 15,085,458 votes, 51.8 percent voted in favor and 48.2 percent opposed. “The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted on Saturday. Trump’s Twitter account appeared to be back as of Saturday night, with the last tweet dated January 8, 2021, in which Trump said, “To everyone who asked, I’m not going to the inauguration on January 20th.”
When asked if he plans to return to Twitter, the former president said maybe not. “I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it,” Trump said, adding that he would stick with his new platform Truth Social, an app developed by his startup Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG). Trump was permanently suspended from Twitter by the previous administration in January 2021, days after an attempted uprising by his supporters in the US Capitol. Unconvinced about the results of the 2020 presidential election, Trump supporters stormed the Capitol as the US Congress tried to confirm Joe Biden’s victory. After that, Twitter’s head of legal affairs and policy, Vijaya Gadde, was at the forefront of the decision to suspend Trump’s Twitter account.
Gadde tweeted that “the @realDonaldTrump account has been permanently suspended from Twitter due to the risk of further violence. We’ve also released our policy enforcement analysis — you can read more about our decision here,” referring to a Twitter blog post about the company’s decision to permanently suspend Trump’s Twitter account.
