• Elon Musk conducted a poll at the weekend to decide whether to reinstate former US president Donald Trump.
• The poll concluded with 15 million votes but this only accounts for a little over six percent of Twitter’s user base.
• Following this poll’s conclusion, Musk has been inundated with requests to unban others including Alex Jones.

At the weekend Elon Musk posted a poll on Twitter to determine whether former President of the United States, Donald Trump, should be reinstated on the platform.

Reinstate former President Trump

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 19, 2022

As you can see above, the majority of users voted yes. Following the conclusion of this poll, Musk triumphantly tweeted “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” before declaring that 134 million users had seen the poll.

While we can’t verify that 134 million users saw the poll, we can say that only 15 million users saw it important enough to cast a vote. According to Twitter’s financial results for the second quarter of the year, it had 237.8 million monetisable daily active users.

While some time has passed since those results, and Musk has said that more folks than ever are using Twitter, we don’t have access to those numbers so we have to use the numbers from Q2’s results.

In short, only 6.3 percent of users found this poll important enough to vote on. What’s more is that only 3.2 percent of Twitter’s entire user base voted “yes” to reinstating Donald Trump.

There’s also the matter of the number of bots and spam accounts that follow Elon Musk. By his own account Twitter has a severe bot and spam problem and as such, can we really trust the results of this single poll conducted during US daily light hours?

Not quite what we’d describe as “the voice of the people”.

And to add insult to injury, Musk really should’ve asked Trump if he wanted to return in the first place. A report from Reuters suggests that Trump is very happy on his own social network, Truth Social and has no intention of returning to Twitter.

The former president’s Twitter account is currently accessible again but has yet to be tweeted from. We suspect that Trump will return as the reach of Twitter is too big to ignore especially given that the reality TV star has announced he’ll be running for office again in 2024.

Following the reinstatement of Trump, Twitter users jumped at the chance to get more users unbanned including Alex Jones. Musk has denied this request but that hasn’t stopped a flood of users calling for people to be unbanned.

Putting Trump’s fate to a poll feels like a mistake as all it does is give fuel to those who want more dangerous individuals back on the platform. For Twitter that could be a disaster as advertisers are already hesitant to keep using the social media site.

If the weekend was anything to go by, this week is going to be another crazy one for Twitter.