Trump Will Be Reinstated
It feels like a pointless exercise to call this out, but Musk himself has admitted that bots on Twitter are a problem. Wouldn't that mean that the results of this poll are bogus? Furthermore, the pool of voters is surely composed primarily of people who follow Musk's Twitter account, so pretty heavily biased. Of course, I don't actually believe Musk was trying to come at this decision logically.
Update: To clarify, I'm making a couple of points here: 1) Based on Musk's own statements, it feels hard to believe that he actually thinks this is a reasonable way to come to a decision on this issue and 2) it's reasonable to view the results of this poll as heavily biased, apart from the bot question. In Trump's case, I think there's actually a real debate as to whether or not his ban was justified. This does not feel like a sound way to reverse Twitter's decision. That should matter to both Trump's supporters and his detractors.
I'll put it another way. Musk could have claimed that he didn't want to ban political speech that was not directly calling for violence because slippery slope and all that. I still wouldn't have agreed with him, but at least I would have felt better about that. That would have at least indicated that he was interested in determining what was right. Instead, he justified his actions with a poll that seems patently unreliable, shirked responsibility for his decision, and threw in some poorly deployed Latin as a heady sounding justification. I'm not at all convinced that he would have maintained Trump's ban if the results would have come out the other way.
I don’t like it, but I’m guessing it serves two purposes for Elon: it gives Twitter more press, and it gives the public a new villain to take the heat off Elon for a while.
It'll be interesting to see if he's more interested in promoting his Truth Social business or getting mass attention on Twitter.
It looks like this was decided via an online poll. Has he abandoned the idea of a "content moderation council" or is he just reserving it for unimportant decisions?
Why do these threads keep getting flagged? There should be a clear explanation.
Original ban thread — Permanent suspension of @realDonaldTrump: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25691912
That will only matter if trump wants to be back. I doubt it really, he has Truth social, and he wants it to succeed
This was very obviously Musk’s plan from the start. Everyone who spent 2 seconds thinking about it knew it. It gives Musk enormous power over US politics and greatly increases the overall user engagement on the platform. Win-win for him. The whole political spectrum in the US cannot and will not stop clicking on everything Trump.
I’m curious what others think: will this have a positive, negative, or inconsequential effect on employee retention?
I have a feeling most employees will be thinking, “oh here we go again…”
Twitter needs trump, he should be paying him to rebuild twitter into a conservative ecosystem of radicalization.
Well this surely will end well lol
Does he know Trump isn't going to pay him $8?
He's probably guessing, "if I'm taking heat for buying Twitter, I might as well lump it all together."
I'm not endorsing his move to reinstate Trump, just taking a guess as to why.
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Elon: "Mr. Trump, I reinstated you on twitter and you won because of all the free media expose you get from it. Now please award me multibillion dollar contracts for Space X, my solar company, my satellite company, and Tesla."
Trump: "OK"
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And now you know the real reason for why Musk purchased twitter. To get those fine juicy government contract when Trump becomes king."
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Time to run for your lives then, the scary orange creature has been unleashed on the blue site.
Absolutely hilarious to see the reaction to all of this. Only when he got banned, it made it to the front-page. [0] But not when the account got reinstated.
Looks like flagging is a coping mechanism as an attempt to avoid both Elon and Trump living in the heads of commenters in [0] rent free as HNers continue to flag the news of an account of a former president being unbanned.
As always, I'm laughing at the Twitter chaos and everyone in [0].