US Business

Donald Trump’s notorious Twitter account was reinstated Saturday after the platform’s new owner Elon Musk ran a poll in which a narrow majority of voters supported the move, days after the former US president announced another White House bid.

Trump’s account was banned from the platform early last year for his role in the January 6 attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his supporters seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

“The people have spoken. Trump will be reinstated,” Musk tweeted, shortly after the 24-hour Twitter poll on his account ended.

“Vox Populi, Vox Dei,” he added, repeating a Latin adage he also posted Friday, meaning “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”

Ultimately, more than 15 million people — out of 237 million daily Twitter users — voted on whether to reinstate the controversial profile, with 51.8 percent in favor and 48.2 percent against.

Trump, who had more than 88 million users when his accounted was suspended, reveled in using Twitter as a mouthpiece during his presidency, posting policy announcements, attacking political rivals and communicating with supporters.

On Saturday, several of his political allies were highlighting his return.

“Welcome back, @realdonaldtrump!” tweeted House Republican Paul Gosar.

Musk’s poll asked for a simple “yes” or “no” response to the statement “Reinstate former President Trump,” which the billionaire Twitter boss posted Friday.

“Fascinating to watch Twitter Trump poll!” Musk mused Saturday morning in a blast of tweets from the controversial and hard-charging new owner of the one-to-many messaging platform.

He has posed similar polls in the past, asking followers last year if he should sell stock in his electric car company Tesla. Following that poll, he sold more than $1 billion in shares.

– Twitter chaos –

Trump has said he will not return to the popular platform but would instead remain on his own network, Truth Social, launched after he was banned from Twitter.

Appearing via video Saturday at a gathering of the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas, Trump said he welcomed Musk’s poll, and was a fan of the man himself, but appeared to reject any return.

“I do like him… you know, he’s a character and again, I like characters,” he said.

“He did put up a poll and it was very overwhelming… but I have something called… Truth Social.”

As to whether he would return to the platform, he said: “I don’t see it because I don’t see any reason for it.”

Musk, also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has come under fire for radical changes at California-based Twitter, which he bought less than a month ago for $44 billion.

Since then, he fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff, scrapped a work-from-home policy and imposed long hours, all while his attempts to overhaul the company faced backlash and delays.

His stumbling attempts to revamp user verification with a controversial subscription service led to a slew of fake accounts and pranks, and prompted major advertisers to step away from the platform.

On Friday, Musk appeared to be pressing on with his plans and reinstated previously banned accounts, including that of comedian Kathy Griffin, which had been taken down after she impersonated him on the site.

The company’s offices were locked down Friday and hundreds of employees quit rather than yield to Musk’s demands that they resign themselves to working long, grueling days at the new Twitter.

After another chaotic week of mass staff departures and policy reversals, Twitter’s future seems highly uncertain, with users — and everybody else — increasingly asking one question: What would a world without the so-called bird app even look like?

With about 237 million daily visitors at the last count in late June, Twitter’s user base is still smaller than Facebook’s nearly two billion, TikTok’s one billion plus and even Snapchat’s 363 million.

But in Twitter’s 15 years of existence, the platform has become the predominant communication channel for political and government leaders, businesses, brands celebrities and news media.

Some, like New York entrepreneur Steve Cohn, are convinced the Twitterverse is only an artificial microcosm of the real world, with limited actual importance.

Twitter is “not ‘essential’ in any way,” Cohn declared — from his own Twitter account. “The world works just fine without Twitter.”

Few people actually tweet, he went on. “Almost all tweets come from (the) 1%. Most normals never log into Twitter.”

But for others, including Karen North, a professor at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism, the site is indispensible for bringing light to little-known conversations.

“Most of the time, people without prominence are not heard,” she said. But on Twitter, “there’s the opportunity to announce things.”

In situations of conflict, social movements or crackdowns, “Twitter I think has become the central platform for being able to disseminate the truth and the ground reality,” Charles Lister, senior fellow at the Middle East Institute in Washington, told AFP.

Like most other social networks, Twitter is also used to spread propaganda and misinformation, and the company has developed moderation tools to try to limit the worst of it.

But their ability to keep up with the demands of such a task has been thrown into question after more than two-thirds of those teams have left since Elon Musk’s controversial takeover.

A 2018 study found that false information circulates faster than posts that have been fact-checked. 

“That’s an unrealistic expectation to imagine a platform where misinformation and disinformation is impossible,” Lister cautioned. 

But “to see information, good and bad, vanish,” with the potential disappearance of Twitter, “is by definition a bad thing,” Lister said. 

“Autocrats and anyone who doesn’t want information widely shared, would potentially benefit from Twitter being gone,” added Mark Hass, a professor at Arizona State University (ASU).

– ‘Public square’ –

A Twitter fail could have devastating effects on journalism, experts say. 

“Twitter… is really not a social network,” North explained. “It’s a network of news and information.”

“It’s the place, the core hub of where journalists go to get a heads up, or a story idea or a headline or a source or a quote,” she said. 

With the reduction of the workforces and budgets in newsrooms, the resources just aren’t there, even at the most well-funded news operations, “to go find sources out in the world,” North lamented. 

Twitter, she said, is where much of that work can be done.

Another knock-on effect of a potential collapse of the platform, according to North, is that without Twitter, the world’s rich and powerful stars and politicians will still be able to command the media’s attention, while those less in the spotlight will struggle for attention.

“With Twitter, anybody can announce a story,” she said.

The site functions as a way to share information in real time.

“Twitter has been a vital source of information, networking, guidance, real-time updates, community mutual aid, & more during hurricanes, wildfires, wars, outbreaks, terrorist attacks, mass shootings… etc,” tweeted University of Maryland researcher Caroline Orr.

“It’s not something that can be replaced by any existing platforms.”

For now, the solution for a potential Twitter alternative is not obvious. 

“Facebook is valuable, but I think it’s almost a bit old fashioned,” Lister said.

Smaller Twitter competitors are likely to syphon off users, including Mastodon, which has grown in popularity since Musk purchased Twitter. 

“But these will likely remain niche, with none of them becoming the public square that Twitter tries to create,” ASU’s Hass said. 

He and North both listed Reddit as a possible substitute, though North said the forum-based network is limited by its fragmented and cluttered design that cannot replicate Twitter’s ease of use.

Could a replacement emerge? “Of course,” Lister added, but he noted such ingenuity takes enormous resources and significant time.

“You can’t just do it overnight.”

While Joe Biden’s administration has named a special counsel to oversee investigations of Donald Trump, Republicans due to take over the US House of Representatives have pledged their own flurry of probes of the president.

So from now until presidential and legislative voting in 2024, Americans could witness a long battle between two camps accusing each other of subverting the justice system for their own political ends.

Repeating a common Trump refrain, Republican Senator Ted Cruz of Texas, for instance, said Friday on Twitter that “Joe Biden has completely weaponized the Department of Justice to attack his political opponents.”

Cruz was reacting to Attorney General Merrick Garland naming a former war crimes prosecutor, Jack Smith, as special counsel to lead two probes of Trump that have been under way for months.

One is focused on the former president’s efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election and on the January 6, 2021 attack on the US Capitol by his supporters.

The other is an investigation into a cache of classified government documents seized in an FBI raid on Trump’s Mar-a-Lago residence in Florida in August.

But as Trump and part of the right wing of his party denounce what they call a witch hunt, Democrats are gearing up to make the same criticism of the Republicans.

Republicans say they plan to use the power of being the controlling party in the House to launch a series of investigations, the first of them centering on the president’s son Hunter.

They suspect him of engaging in shady business deals in Ukraine in China, capitalizing on his last name and his father’s influence as vice president under Barack Obama from 2009 to 2017.

“There’s no plans to subpoena Joe Biden. There are plans to subpoena Hunter Biden,” Representative James Comer said Thursday on CNN, outlining his party’s strategy.

This Kentucky lawmaker has emerged as a chief investigator of sorts for the Republicans after the November 8 midterm elections in which they won control of the House, albeit by a slim majority, but failed to take the Senate.

Comer is apparently in line to head the House Oversight Committee, the congressional panel that among things watches over the behavior of the executive branch and, if need be, can investigate it.

But Comer made clear that not just Hunter Biden but his father will be investigated.

“This needs to be called the Biden investigation and not the Hunter Biden investigation,” he said.

– Origins of Covid 19 –

Comer also said the panel will probe the origins of the coronavirus pandemic and what role a laboratory in Wuhan, China may have had. The issue is a bone many Republicans have gnawed on for years.

Republicans have also said they plan to investigate the Biden administration’s handling of incoming migration across the US border with Mexico.

While Democrats deny Hunter Biden did anything wrong, Comer gave assurances that the probe will not be a political circus.

“This isn’t a dog-and-pony show. This isn’t a committee where everybody’s gonna scream and be outraged and try to make the witnesses look like fools,” Comer said in an interview on November 8 with Politico.

One of the most outspoken lawmakers on the far right, the election denier Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who has made remarks dismissed by critics as outlandish and racist, has said she wants a seat on the oversight committee.

Democrats are preparing a counteroffensive.

Politico reports that supporters of the party have created something called the Congressional Integrity Project, designed exclusively to respond to Republican congressional investigations.

The idea is to “investigate the investigators, expose their political motivations and the monied special interests supporting their work,” the founder of the project, Kyle Herrig, a lawyer and activist, told Politico.

The main goal of the Republicans, Herrig said, is not to seek the truth but rather “to smear Joe Biden and do the political bidding of Trump.”

Donald Trump received a standing ovation at a Republican Party gathering Saturday, even as several possible White House rivals lashed out at his election denialism and insisted it was time to move on from the former US president.

In his first major appearance since announcing his intention to run again in 2024, Trump told the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas that the party had grown under his leadership.

The 76-year-old falsely insisted once again that the 2020 presidential election — which he lost — was rigged, and rejected responsibility for the GOP’s poor performance in the November midterms.

In 2020 “we had a really disgraceful election, many millions of votes more than we had in 2016… and the result was, in my opinion, an absolute sham,” he told the audience by video link.

“The election as rigged, and it’s too bad it was.”

Asked about how he could improve the party’s appeal to suburban voters, among whom it did badly in this month’s midterms, Trump insisted he had a record of picking winners.

“In the midterms, as you’ve probably heard, I was 222 wins and 16 losses, the press doesn’t want to mention that, and the Republican Party got five million more votes than the Democrats,” he said, despite the final vote tallies not yet being finalized. 

“The Republican Party is a much bigger and more powerful party than it was before I got there,” he said.

Trump was warmly welcomed by the crowd, which had earlier heard from key party figures whose names are often mentioned as possibly 2024 presidential contenders.

Many of them hit out at Trump’s grievance-laden style of politicking, which Republican Party operatives have said was to blame for their tepid showing on November 8.

– ‘Joy and a smile’ –

New Jersey’s former governor and one-time Trump confidante Chris Christie said candidate quality had been the issue.

“Donald Trump picked candidates with one criteria. Not electability, not experience, not wisdom, not charisma, not the ability to govern, but ‘do you believe the 2020 election was stolen or not?’ If you do I endorse you. If you don’t I reject you,” he said.

“The fact of the matter is the reason we’re losing is because Donald Trump has put himself before everybody else.”

Chris Sununu, governor of New Hampshire, agreed.

“I got a great policy for the Republican Party. Let’s stop supporting crazy unelectable candidates in our primaries,” he said.

On Friday evening, Trump’s former secretary of state, Mike Pompeo, who is also understood to be mulling a run at the White House, urged fellow Republicans to be more forward-looking and more positive.

While he did not mention his old boss by name, Pompeo made none-too-subtle digs about the need to be doers, rather than complainers.

“As we present the conservative case, as we make the argument… we do so with joy, and a smile,” he said.

“We don’t simply rail against the machine… we don’t simply go on Fox News or send tweets, we actually do the hard work.”

Trump did not address the potential rivals in his appearance on Saturday, but has already begun his customary bomb-throwing about potential presidential competitors, dubbing Ron DeSantis, who is set to speak later Saturday, “Ron DeSanctimonious” and saying Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin’s name “sounds Chinese.”

The gathering, which also featured an address by Israel’s prime minister-designate Benjamin Netanyahu, runs until Sunday.

President Joe Biden welcomed guests to the White House Saturday for the wedding of his granddaughter Naomi — an unprecedented ceremony that was closed to the press.

The 28-year-old Washington-based lawyer married Peter Neal, 25, a law graduate, on the mansion’s South Lawn in an 11:00 am ceremony witnessed by about 250 guests, according to the White House.

The grounds were suitingly decorated with white flowers, as invitees in rows looked on, according to photos taken from far away by AFP.

Naomi Biden is the daughter of the president’s son Hunter.

“It has been a joy to watch Naomi grow, discover who she is, and carve out such an incredible life for herself,” the president and First Lady Jill Biden said in statement.

“Now, we are filled with pride to see her choose Peter as her husband and we’re honored to welcome him to our family,” they added. “We wish them days full of laughter and a love that grows deeper with every passing year.”

It is not unheard of for the presidential mansion with America’s most stately address — 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — to be decked out for nuptials.

The White House Historical Association says 18 weddings have been performed at the mansion, including those of Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia in 1971 and Barack Obama’s official photographer, Pete Souza, in 2013.

The association says four times the White House has also hosted receptions for weddings held elsewhere, for instance that of George W. Bush’s daughter Jenna in 2008.

But this is the first time a president’s granddaughter is getting hitched there.

– ‘Pop’ –

The White House in its brief statement said the Bidens hosted a wedding luncheon for family and the wedding party in the State Dining Room, and a reception with dancing was planned for later Saturday.

But otherwise the president’s office has given few details on this wedding, which is classified as strictly private and is closed to the press. 

This has raised some eyebrows.

“The White House press has covered weddings held there through history because the space belongs to the American people and a president’s participation is an event of national interest,” Kelly O’Donnell, an NBC reporter slated to become the next president of the White House Correspondents Association, said Thursday on Twitter.

Naomi Biden announced her wedding plans in September on her Instagram account, which features photos of vacations, the Biden clan and her day-to-day life.

Biden is very close to his grandchildren, who call him Pop and are often seen with him, even at some official events.

Naomi is named after the president’s first daughter, who died as a baby in a car crash in 1972 that also claimed the life of his first wife.

US press reports have said Naomi Biden plays an important role in the president’s inner circle and pressed him, for instance, to run for president in 2020.

President Joe Biden welcomed guests to the White House Saturday for the wedding of his granddaughter Naomi — an unprecedented ceremony that was closed to the press.

Naomi Biden, a 28-year-old lawyer in Washington, is marrying Peter Neal, 25, also an attorney. Biden is the daughter of the president’s son Hunter.

It is not unheard of for the presidential mansion with America’s most stately address — 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue — to be decorated with white flowers for a wedding.

The White House Historical Association says 18 weddings have been performed at the mansion, including those of Richard Nixon’s daughter Tricia in 1971 and Barack Obama’s official photographer, Pete Souza, in 2013.

The association says four times the White House has also hosted receptions for weddings held elsewhere, for instance that of George W. Bush’s daughter Jenna in 2008.

But this is the first time a president’s granddaughter is getting hitched there.

– ‘Pop’ –

The White House has given few details on this wedding, which is classified as strictly private and is closed to the press. This has raised some eyebrows.

“The White House press has covered weddings held there through history because the space belongs to the American people and a president’s participation is an event of national interest,” Kelly O’Donnell, an NBC reporter slated to become the next president of the White House Correspondents Association, said Thursday on Twitter.

The New York Times has reported a few tidbits about the bride and groom and what it says the wedding will entail: Biden and Neal are actually living at the White House for the time being, and they will exchange vows before a luncheon, to be followed by a big gala dinner in the evening.

Naomi Biden announced her wedding plans in September on her Instagram account, which features photos of vacations, the Biden clan and her day to day life.

Biden is very close to his grandchildren, who call him Pop and are often seen with him, even at some official events.

Naomi is named after the president’s first daughter, who died as a baby in a car crash in 1972 that also claimed the life of his first wife.

US press reports have said Naomi Biden plays an important role in the president’s inner circle and pressed him, for instance, to run for president in 2020.

Elon Musk expressed excitement Saturday as he watched votes pour in on a Twitter poll he has posted on whether to readmit Donald Trump to the messaging platform.

“Reinstate former President Trump,” the billionaire Twitter owner posted Friday, with a chance to vote either yes or no.

As of about 1500 GMT Saturday, 52.3 percent of nearly 11 million responses were in favor of a return of the former president, who was banned from Twitter for his role in last year’s attack on the US Capitol by a mob of his followers seeking to overturn the results of the 2020 election.

Musk said the poll was drawing a million answers one way or another per hour.

“Fascinating to watch Twitter Trump poll!” Musk said Saturday morning in the latest blast of tweets from the hard-charging new owner of the one-to-many messaging platform.

There was no indication that the mercurial boss of Space-X and Tesla would adhere to the results of the ad hoc poll. 

But on Friday, Musk also posted a Latin adage suggesting that the decision would be up to Twitter users: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” (“The voice of the people is the voice of God”).

He has done similar polls in the past, asking followers last year if he should sell stock in his electric car company Tesla. Following that poll, he sold more than $1 billion in shares.

Trump, who reveled in using Twitter as a mouthpiece, was followed by more than 88 million users. 

He has said he will not return to the popular platform but would instead remain on his own network, Truth Social, launched after he was banned from Twitter.

Musk, also the CEO of Tesla and SpaceX, has come under fire for radical changes at the California-based firm, which he bought less than a month ago for $44 billion.

Since then, he fired half of Twitter’s 7,500 staff, scrapped a work-from-home policy and imposed long hours, all while his attempts to overhaul the company faced backlash and delays.

His stumbling attempts to revamp user verification with a controversial subscription service led to a slew of fake accounts and pranks, and prompted major advertisers to step away from the platform.

On Friday, Musk appeared to be pressing on with his plans and reinstated previously banned accounts, including that of comedian Kathy Griffin, which had been taken down after she impersonated him on the site.

The company’s offices were locked down Friday and hundreds of employees quit rather than yield to Musk’s demands that they resign themselves to working long, grueling days at the new Twitter.