During a speech at a Financial Times conference on Tuesday, Elon Musk said that he would reverse the ban of Former President Donald Trump on Twitter once his purchase is completed.
Trump was permanently banned from the social media platform on Jan. 8, 2021, following the riots at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. Twitter said at the time that the ban was "due to the risk of further incitement of violence."
"Permanent bans should be extremely rare and really reserved for accounts that are bots, or scam, spam accounts… I do think it was not correct to ban Donald Trump," Musk said, according to CNBC.
"I think that was a mistake, because it alienated a large part of the country and did not ultimately result in Donald Trump not having a voice."
Musk then went on to make his intentions clear, but added that reversing Twitter's ban on Trump is dependent on him owning the company. His $44 billion purchase of Twitter is expected to be completed within the next three to six months, according to The New York Times.
"I would reverse the permanent ban," Musk said. "I don’t own Twitter yet. So this is not like a thing that will definitely happen, because what if I don’t own Twitter?"
The Tesla CEO added that he thinks Trump should have received something along the lines of a "temporary suspension" and not a permanent ban from the platform.
"If there are tweets that are wrong and bad, those should be either deleted or made invisible, and a suspension—a temporary suspension—is appropriate, but not a permanent ban," Musk said, according to The Wall Street Journal.
Musk has said that his main goal by purchasing Twitter is to promote free speech on the platform.
About a year after being permanently banned from Twitter, Trump launched his own social media company, Truth Social. While the former president has not posted on the platform yet, he told Fox News on April 25 that he doesn't plan to return to Twitter just because Musk is purchasing it and offering to return his account back.
"I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on TRUTH," Trump said. "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."
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