Donald Trump ‘planning Twitter comeback’ as he plots 2024 presidential campaign
Donald Trump is planning a return to Twitter as part of his 2024 presidential campaign, US media report.
The former US President is allegedly working with his campaign advisers to worskhop ideas for his first tweet, after the social media platform’s new owner Elon Musk reinstated his account on November 19.
Mr Trump has been talking about his return to Twitter, Replicans have told NBC News, but it is unclear when or how.
His campaign is formally petitioning Facebook’s parent company, Meta, to unblock his account after it was locked following the US Capitol riot, according to NBC.
“We believe that the ban on President Trump’s account on Facebook has dramatically distorted and inhibited the public discourse,” Trump’s campaign wrote in its letter to Meta on Tuesday, according to a copy reviewed by NBC News.
Mr Trump has also told Fox News that he is in talks with Meta about a possible return to Facebook and Instagram.
He said: “We are talking to them, and we’ll see how it all works out.
“If they took us back, it would help them greatly, and that’s okay with me. But they need us more than we need them.”
A spokesperson for Meta has told US media the company will announce a decision “in the coming weeks in line with the process we laid out.”
Both Facebook and Twitter banned Mr Trump a day after his supporters stormed the White House in January 2021.
At the time Facebook said Mr Trump’s ban would be reviewed after two years, in January 2023, and he would only be allowed back on the platform if the “risk to public safety” had receded.
Mr Trump announced in November that he had officially launched a third bid for the US presidency.
He launched his own social media app, Truth Social, in February 2022 but Google had concerns about insufficient moderation. Mr Trump has slightly more than 4.8 million followers on the platform, compared to nearly 88 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook.
Mr Trump describes the app as a platform created to “stand up to the tyranny of Big Tech”. It was launched on February 21, 2022, though many people were on a waiting list and could not sign up until late April.
Posts on the app are called “Truths”. Each “Truth” in a user’s feed has a comments section and can be “re-Truthed” or liked, mirroring Twitter interactions.
Before his Twitter account was removed, Mr Trump would often go on angry rants for all his 90 million followers to see. An archive of his past tweets revealed that Mr Trump tweeted more than 30 times a day on average by the end of his time in office.
