Will Donald Trump be allowed back on Twitter after Elon Musk takeover?

Tesla billionaire’s bid to buy social media giant has thrilled many pro-Trump Republicans

Twitter‘s announcement that it has struck a $44bn sale agreement with billionaire Elon Musk has sent a jolt of positive energy through many Republicans. Members of Congress including Marjorie Taylor Greene and Jim Jordan have celebrated the news as a potential breakthrough for “free speech” and hoped that some of them who’ve been “censored” might get their accounts back.

But looming largest of all, as ever, is Donald Trump.

The former president was banned from Twitter after the Capitol attack of 6 January 2021, which many outside the loyal majority of the Republican Party hold him at least partly responsible for inciting. He was also banned from Facebook, leaving him without access to the two biggest social media platforms in the Anglophone world – and his efforts to create a right-wing alternative have fallen embarrassingly flat.

This has all fuelled a right-wing effort to frame “big tech” as one of the great threats to American life, accusing the major platforms of violating “free speech” by censoring conservative officeholders who use their services.

Assuming Mr Musk’s offer to buy the platform does come to fruition and restores Mr Trump’s account will depend in large part on the amount of direct control the sometimes erratic billionaire decides to wield at the company, but from the point of view of Mr Trump’s allies in the GOP, the signs are encouraging.

As Mr Musk put it at a recent TED event: “A good sign as to whether there is free speech is: Is someone you don’t like allowed to say something you don’t like? If that is the case, then we have free speech.”

However, Mr Musk’s politics are not always easy to pin down. He appears to hold Joe Biden in contempt, recently calling him a “damp sock puppet in human form”, and he several times sided against the mainstream scientific consensus during the Covid-19 pandemic – at one point reopening a California Tesla plant in defiance of a county shutdown order. (Hundreds of workers went on to contract the virus.)

Yet Mr Musk is hardly an out-and-out Trump supporter: he has criticised various of the president’s policies, and in 2019 supported fellow tech entrepreneur and universal basic income advocate Andrew Yang in his campaign for the Democratic nomination.

Ultimately, Mr Musk has not said anything to indicate that Mr Trump’s return to Twitter is a specific priority for him. Still, his reputation as a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” was given heft by a poll he ran for his followers in March.

“Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square,” he wrote, “failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy. What should be done?”

In another more recent tweet, though, he seemed to be aiming for something slightly more consensus-driven than many Trump supporters might prefer: “A social media platform’s policies are good if the most extreme 10% on left and right are equally unhappy.”

Mr Trump, for his part, on Monday said he has no interest in rejoining Twitter as he’s focused on his own platform, Truth Social.

“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH,” Trump told Fox News. “I hope Elon buys Twitter because he’ll make improvements to it and he is a good man, but I am going to be staying on TRUTH.”

The former president said he will begin “TRUTHing” over the next week.