The beginning of noise and the end of Twitter. An autistic idiot billionaire single handedly destroyed a platform because he was upset over a fucking troll following his movements.
The former president will likely be back on it as soon as the month ends. He right now claims he will stay on Truth Social but do not expect it to be in the short term. He misses tweeting to his supporters. He had over 90 million followers.
Musk is embattled right now with Twitter, Tesla and SpaceX. Inventors are concerned about his sanity and his ability to maintain three companies while not operating either strategically.
On Friday, Musk did an unscientific poll stating that he would could reinstate the former president. Overwhelmingly folks voted (bot accounts) in favor of the noise.
Musk made the announcement in the evening after holding a poll that asked Twitter users to click “yes” or “no” on whether Washed Up 45’s account should be restored. The “yes” vote won, with 51.8%. Previously, Musk had said Twitter would establish new procedures and a “content moderation council” before making decisions to restore suspended accounts.
“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated. Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” Musk tweeted, using a Latin phrase meaning “the voice of the people, the voice of God.”
Shortly afterward Washed Up 45’s account, which had earlier appeared as suspended, reappeared on the platform complete with his former tweets, more than 59,000 of them. His followers were gone, at least initially, but he quickly began regaining them. There were no new tweets from the account as of late Saturday, however.
Musk restored the account less than a month after the Tesla CEO took control of Twitter and four days after the former president announced his candidacy for the 2024 presidential race.
It is not clear whether Washed Up 45 would actually return to Twitter. An irrepressible tweeter before he was banned, the former president has said in the past that he would not rejoin even if his account was reinstated. He has been relying on his own, much smaller social media site, Truth Social, which he launched after being blocked from Twitter.
And on Saturday, during a video speech to a Republican Jewish group meeting in Las Vegas, the former president said that he was aware of Musk’s poll but that he saw “a lot of problems at Twitter.”
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| The decision will have immediate backlash. |
“I hear we’re getting a big vote to also go back on Twitter. I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it,” the former president said. “It may make it, it may not make it,” he added, apparently referring to Twitter’s recent internal upheavals.
The prospect of restoring Washed Up 45’s presence to the platform follows Musk’s purchase last month of Twitter — an acquisition that has fanned widespread concern that the billionaire owner will allow purveyors of lies and misinformation to flourish on the site. Musk has frequently expressed his belief that Twitter had become too restrictive of freewheeling speech.
His efforts to reshape the site have been both swift and chaotic. Musk has fired many of the company’s 7,500 full-time workers and an untold number of contractors who are responsible for content moderation and other crucial responsibilities. His demand that remaining employees pledge to “extremely hardcore” work triggered a wave of resignations, including hundreds of software engineers.
Users have reported seeing increased spam and scams on their feeds and in their direct messages, among other glitches, in the aftermath of the mass layoffs and worker exodus. Some programmers who were fired or resigned this week warned that Twitter may soon fray so badly it could actually crash.
Twitter is ALIVE
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022
The people have spoken.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 20, 2022
Trump will be reinstated.
Vox Populi, Vox Dei. https://t.co/jmkhFuyfkv
134M people have seen this poll
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 6, 2021
The Vice President has the power to reject fraudulently chosen electors.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 5, 2021
Musk’s online survey, posted on his own Twitter account, drew more than 15 million votes in the 24 hours in which it ran.
Musk conceded that the results were hardly scientific. “Bot & troll armies might be running out of steam soon,” he tweeted Saturday morning. “Some interesting lessons to clean up future polls.”
It’s not the first time he’s used Twitter polling to make business decisions. Last year he sold millions of shares of his Tesla stock after asking his followers whether he should.
Democratic U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York responded to Musk’s poll on Washed Up 45 by tweeting video of the Jan. 6 insurrection. She tweeted Friday that when the former president was last on Twitter, it “was used to incite an insurrection, multiple people died, the Vice President of the United States was nearly assassinated, and hundreds were injured but I guess that’s not enough for you to answer the question. Twitter poll it is.”
The former president lost his access to Twitter two days after his supporters stormed the Capitol, soon after the former president had exhorted them to “fight like hell.” Twitter dropped his account after the former president wrote a pair of tweets that the company said cast further doubts on the legitimacy of the presidential election and raised risks for the Biden presidential inauguration.
After the Jan. 6 attack, Washed Up 45 was also kicked off Facebook and Instagram, which are owned by Meta Platforms, and Snapchat. His ability to post videos to his YouTube channel was also suspended. Facebook is set to reconsider the former president's suspension in January.
Throughout his tenure as president, Washed Up 45’s use of social media posed a significant challenge to major social media platforms that sought to balance the public’s interest in hearing from public officials with worries about misinformation, bigotry, harassment and incitement of violence.
But in a speech at an auto conference in May, Musk asserted that Twitter’s ban of the former president was a “morally bad decision” and “foolish in the extreme.”
Earlier this month, Musk, who completed the $44 billion takeover of Twitter in late October, declared that the company wouldn’t let anyone who had been kicked off the site return until Twitter had established procedures on how to do so, including forming a “content moderation council.”
On Friday, Musk tweeted that the suspended Twitter accounts for the comedian Kathy Griffin, the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson and the conservative Christian news satire website Babylon Bee had been reinstated. He added that a decision on the former president had not yet been made. He also responded “no” when someone on Twitter asked him to reinstate the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’ account.
In a tweet Friday, the Tesla CEO described the company’s new content policy as “freedom of speech, but not freedom of reach.”
He explained that a tweet deemed to be “negative” or to include “hate” would be allowed on the site but would be visible only to users who specifically searched for it. Such tweets also would be “demonetized, so no ads or other revenue to Twitter,” Musk said.
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