Will Donald Trump Come Back to Twitter With Elon Musk as the New Owner?

Back in January of 2021, Twitter famously, or perhaps infamously, enacted a permanent ban on their most popular account. That of former President Donald Trump. For the first time in years, the @realDonaldTrump handle was gone, and most of what made Twitter interesting was gone with it. As a result, conservative Twitter splintered into new factions, fleeing the platform for alternative forums such as Parler or Gab, and eventually GETTR and now Truth Social, the platform backed by Trump himself.

However, with the recent news that the Twitter board has accepted Elon Musk’s offer to buy the company and take it private, what will happen with Donald Trump’s Twitter account?

Musk has been a longtime critic of Twitter’s censorship rules, often calling for transparency in the way it operates and how it decides to limit the reach of certain accounts or tweets, without the user knowing, a technique referred to as “shadow banning.”

The question then remains, if Twitter becomes a private company, which is now the case, and with Elon Musk at the helm calling for a new era of less censorship and more voices on the platform, will former President Donald Trump be tweeting once again from @realDonaldTrump?

For the moment, the answer seems to be a firm “No” according to reports:

Donald Trump told CNBC on Monday he wouldn’t return to Twitter even if Elon Musk, the company’s incoming owner, reversed the former president’s ban.

“No, I won’t be going back on Twitter,” Trump told CNBC’s Joe Kernen.

“I will be on Truth Social within the week. Its on schedule. We have a lot of people signed up. I like Elon Musk. I like him a lot. He’s an excellent individual. We did a lot for Twitter when I was in the White House. I was disappointed by the way I was treated by Twitter. I won’t be going back on Twitter,” he said.

As Musk noted in recent weeks, he believes Twitter’s censorship rules should be no more restrictive than the actual laws of the country the user is operating in. Such as, saying something dumb or mean is allowed since it’s allowed on the street corner. Threatening violence or harm would get you shut down the same way threatening violence on the street corner would get you arrested. Gone would be the days, or so it seems, when accounts would be limited simply for sharing something that Twitter decided was “misinformation” because it fell the wrong way politically.

This is akin to the way the New York Post was shut down for accurately reporting on the corruption of Hunter Biden and the entire Biden family back during the 2020 presidential campaign.

Truth Social has been languishing a couple of months since its launch waiting for Trump to join the platform, as promised, and make it his new social media home. As with every early mass communication platform, there were bugs and scale issues to address. Now that it seems the platform is ready, reports indicate that Trump is set to start using Truth Social within the next week or so.

However, it seems hard to believe that if Trump was given the green light to once again return to Twitter, with an audience likely larger than that of Truth Social, he wouldn’t jump at the opportunity. It would be perhaps most useful as a tool to promote Trump’s own platform, or perhaps offer infrequent smaller updates to a Twitter audience with a promise of more content from Trump’s account on Truth Social.

Then again, it’s also possible that if Musk truly does improve Twitter to the point where all users feel like the rules are transparent, and accounts are treated equally under the laws governing freedom of speech as they exist between citizens and the government, then maybe Trump would become a Twitter mainstay once again.