Elon Musk (left) announced weeks ago that he does not want to keep users like Donald Trump away from Twitter for life

DLNews Business:

Twitter's new owner Elon Musk (51), lets users vote on whether ex-President Donald Trump's (76) account should be restored. The tech billionaire started the 24-hour survey in a tweet on Saturday night. By 7 p.m. local time, around 3.7 million Twitter users had already voted.

Musk commented on the poll with "Vox populi, vox dei" (People's voice (is) God's voice).

Trump has been banned from Twitter since January 2021. On January 6, he expressed sympathy for his supporters who had stormed the Capitol in Washington. There, Joe Biden's election victory was to be officially sealed - which only happened hours later because of the attack.

He fueled false expectations among his supporters that Vice President Mike Pence could refuse to confirm the election results that day. During the attack, Trump tweeted that Pence didn't dare to do the right thing. Afterward, people in the crowd shouted, "Hang Mike Pence!"

Twitter interpreted Trump's behavior that day as a call for violence and permanently suspended his account because it was not the first violation. Until Musk's takeover, Twitter executives had consistently insisted that there was no way for the ex-president to return.

Musk, who recently acknowledged the political positions of Trump's Republicans, said months ago that, in his view, there should be no lifelong bans on the service. He specifically mentioned Trump.

However, he announced that before significant accounts were restored, a council on how to deal with controversial content would be formed. It is still being determined whether he is now taking the poll results as an opportunity to offer Trump a return more quickly.

The ex-president has repeatedly said he does not want to return to Twitter. He likes it much better with his own copy of Twitter, Truth Social. However, Trump once had more than 80 million followers on Twitter - on Truth Social, it is only a few million. And the ex-president just announced that he is running for the Republican nomination in the 2024 presidential election.

Facebook, where Trump has also been blocked since January 2021, wants to decide next January whether the ex-president could be offered a return.