Newsweek: Will Trump Staying Off Twitter Doom Him Politically?

Former President Donald Trump‘s Twitter account was reinstated over the weekend after its new owner, Elon Musk, conducted a poll of users to see whether they wanted him to return to the platform.

While the account is active, it’s not certain whether Trump will actually log into his long-dormant account. Trump—now in his third bid for the White House—also maintains an exclusive content licensing agreement with his own Truth Social platform, requiring him to post content to his own social network six hours before he posts it anywhere else. …

While some figures on Twitter continued to share disinformation on the platform around the 2022 midterm election cycle, Jesse Littlewood, vice president of campaigns at the nonpartisan watchdog group Common Cause, told Newsweek that the amount of disinformation about election integrity substantially decreased after Trump left the platform, falling below levels seen in the 2018 midterms, according to a survey by online monitoring platform Zignal Labs published in the Washington Post. …

Trump, Littlewood said, was a thought leader for a movement, with an unparalleled reach that commanded attention: “When Trump tweeted something, it would be amplified in mainstream news networks,” he said.