Elon Musk’s deal to buy Twitter Inc sets the scene for a potential return of Donald Trump to a platform that helped him win the White House just in time to influence the US midterm elections.

The former president told Fox News on Monday that he intends to stick with a social-media platform he launched, called Truth Social. But that operation has struggled and the temptation may be great to return to Twitter where he had more than 88 million followers. #BringBackTrump was making the rounds on Twitter. 

Twitter permanently banned Trump last year after a mob of his supporters stormed the US Capitol, but Musk has made it clear that his main goal in buying the company is to support free expression and reduce user bans or taking down individual tweets because the platform has become “kind of the de-facto town square”.

Republican pollster Frank Luntz said he doesn’t think Trump will be able to resist returning to Twitter, and that Musk will want the former president back on the platform.

“He wants to be where the people are, and the people are on Twitter,” Luntz said. “I fully expect Donald Trump to use every venue possible.”

A reversal of Trump’s ban would restore his favourite megaphone that he could use to guide the Republican agenda, ridicule the Biden administration and promote candidates in the November election that will determine control of US Congress. 

Musk, a billionaire entrepreneur and chief executive officer of Tesla Inc, agreed to buy Twitter for US$44bil , using one of the biggest leveraged buyout deals in history to take private the 16-year-old social networking platform.

A Twitter owned by Musk could also amplify the enmity between the Tesla chief and the current president. Musk hasn’t been shy about tweeting criticisms of Joe Biden and his policies, and while Biden has embraced electric vehicles as vital to his economic and climate ambitions, he’s conspicuously snubbed Musk’s Tesla with its non-union workforce.

Some conservatives immediately hailed the development. Ron DeSantis, Republican governor of Florida, tweeted that it is “a good deal for shareholders and raises the prospect that the platform will be a place where free speech can thrive, not a tool for narrative enforcement”.

Meanwhile, the NAACP warned against permitting the return of Trump to Twitter.

“Mr. Musk: free speech is wonderful, hate speech is unacceptable. Disinformation, misinformation and hate speech have NO PLACE on Twitter,” Derrick Johnson, president of the civil rights group, said in a statement.

Trump, in an interview with Fox News, refuted the idea he’d return to Twitter.

“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth,” Trump told the cable outlet. “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.”

Trump spokesman Taylor Budowich confirmed Trump’s comments, published on Fox’s website, that he plans to start using his own social-media platform rather than returning to Twitter are accurate. 

But Trump’s nascent platform has had a rocky launch. It has been plagued by snags with declining downloads, and Trump has posted only once to his account on Truth Social. And it has nowhere near the reach Trump had when his prolific tweets reached millions of followers directly and were amplified by the press and other users.

Shares of Digital World Acquisition Corp, a special purpose acquisition company that plans to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group that launched Truth Social, plummeted following news that Musk was near a deal for Twitter.

“Twitter becoming open to a bigger variety of voices is likely to the be last nail in the coffin of Truth Social’s SPAC,” said Max Gokhman, chief investment officer at money manager AlphaTrAI Inc. “It’s hard to see any upside for them given all of the internal struggles with even launching a scalable social platform and now the likelihood that Twitter will allow a broader range of discourse.”

Twitter, citing rules against glorifying violence, permanently banned Trump’s account in January 2021 after he encouraged his supporters to march on the US Capitol in what became a deadly attempt to stop the counting of Electoral College votes for Biden. Trump also remains banned from Meta Platform Inc’s Facebook.

The former president has sued Twitter and Facebook to get his social-media accounts restored.

If Trump is allowed back on Twitter, many news outlets will again be compelled to write stories based on his tweets that will amplify them, said Jeff Jarvis, a professor at the Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism at the City University of New York.

“I dread what we had before, which was the media turning his every utterance into a story,” Jarvis said. Journalists couldn’t entirely ignore Trump’s posts, particularly if he runs for president again, but they need to do a better job of using news judgment, he said.

 - Bloomberg