Elon Musk has vowed to restore Donald Trump’s Twitter account if his takeover of the social media platform goes through.
The former US President was banned from the website following the deadly storming of the Capitol, which left five people dead.
Trump was slammed by Twitter officials for a string of Tweets that questioned the legitimacy of the 2020 Presidential Election - which saw the 75-year-old lose out to Joe Biden.
The Republican’s ban was then made permanent by Twitter for violating its ‘glorification of violence’ policy.
There has been speculation that this ban may be overturned if Elon Musk’s agreed £34.5bn takeover of Twitter goes through - which is expected to happen later this year.
The tech mogul and Tesla owner has already pledged to improve ‘free speech’ on the website.
Speaking virtually at the Financial Times Future of the Car Summit yesterday, the 50-year-old businessman described Twitter’s decision to ban Trump as ‘morally bad’ and claimed it undermined the public’s trust in the platform.
He argued that tweets which are illegal or ‘destructive’ should be deleted or made invisible - with permanent bans being a last resort.
Mr Musk said: “I think there’s a general question of should Twitter have permanent bans? I’ve talked with Jack Dorsey about this and he and I are of the same mind which is that permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots or spam scam accounts.
“I do think that it was not correct to ban Donald Trump. I think that was a mistake because it an alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice… 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 I would reverse the permanent ban, obviously, I don’t own Twitter yet, so this is not a thing that will definitely happen because what if I don’t own Twitter?
“But my opinion and Jack Dorsey, I want to be clear, shares, that we should not have permanent bans.
“Now, that doesn’t mean that somebody gets to say whatever they want to say, if they say something that is illegal or otherwise, just destructive to the world, then that there should be perhaps a timeout, a temporary suspension, or that particular tweet should be made invisible or have very limited traction.”
Donald Trump refused to rule out running for president again in 2024 during an interview with Piers Morgan on TalkTV last month.
When responding speculation of his potential bid for a return to the White House, Mr Trump said: “For reasons of campaign finance and everything I’m not allowed to say, but let me just say this, I think a lot of people are going to be very happy.”
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