(FiveNation.com)- While addressing the Financial Times’ Future of the Car conference last Tuesday, Tesla CEO Elon Musk said Twitter’s decision to permanently ban former President Trump was a “morally bad decision and foolish in the extreme.”
Musk added that by banning Trump, Twitter alienated a large segment of the country while failing to prevent him from “having a voice.”
At the same time, Musk reiterated that he doesn’t believe people should be permitted to say things that are “illegal or destructive to the world.” But rather than a permanent ban, Musk said he supports temporary suspensions or making a “particular tweet” “invisible or have very little traction.”
Musk said at the conference that permanent bans “should be extremely rare,” being used only against bot or spam accounts.
On Thursday, Musk reiterated his position, saying in a tweet that even though he believes Republicans would be better off nominating “a less divisive candidate” in 2024, Musk still thinks Trump’s Twitter account should be restored.
In a later tweet, Musk described what he believed was Joe Biden’s biggest mistake. Biden, Musk explained, mistakenly thought he was elected president to “transform the country,” when in reality, people “just wanted less drama.”
Former President Trump has maintained that he would not return to Twitter should his account be restored, but would remain exclusively on his social media platform Truth Social.
Last week, Musk announced that the $44 billion deal with Twitter has been put on hold pending a review of the number of bot accounts on the platform. While Musk maintained that he is “still committed” to the acquisition, he wants to make certain that bot accounts represent less than 5 percent of Twitter’s total users.
For some time, Twitter has faced criticism for not doing enough to rein in bot accounts on its platform. In a filing from April, the company estimated that in the first quarter of 2022, less than 5 percent of its accounts are fake.
