Elon Musk said he would allow President Trump to return to Twitter if he takes ownership of the company, reversing the former president’s Jan. 2021 suspension over his incendiary tweets surrounding the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

       “A temporary suspension is appropriate, but not a permanent ban,” Musk said during a virtual appearance at the Financial Times Future of the Car summit.

       The comments come amidst fears that Musk, who is seeking to buy the site for $44 billion, would view some content moderation efforts aimed at keeping harmful content off the platform as censorship. Allowing Trump to return to the platform would be in line with Musk’s ongoing criticism of how the app handles free speech, but also continue to fuel those concerns.

       Twitter permanently suspended Trump two days after the Capitol attack, “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

       Musk said the decision to suspend Trump was “morally wrong” and that it led to conservatives moving to more insular spaces. “Banning Trump from Twitter didn’t end Trump’s voice, it will amplify it among the right,” he said.

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       Trump has said that he would not rejoin Twitter if given the chance, but would continue boosting Truth Social, the free speech-focused Twitter competitor that Trump himself launched in the wake of his various social media bans. The app has struggled with technical problems, an atrophying user-base and high-level resignations; even Trump himself seems uninterested in using it as much as he once used Twitter.

       Other alternative apps that seemed primed to break into the mainstream post-Jan. 6 — such as Parler, Gab and MeWe — have similarly failed to do so.

       But the implications aren’t just restricted to Twitter. The platform has historically served as something of a social media weather-vane, indicating where the trade-winds of the industry are headed, and — its content moderation decisions have often preceded similar calls by Facebook.

       While Twitter suspended Trump within two days of the Jan. 6 insurrection, Facebook moved to suspend Trump’s account indefinitely, but punted the specifics of that timeline to the company’s third-party oversight board — which in turn sent the decision right back to Facebook. Forced to make the call itself, Facebook extended the former president’s ban until Jan. 7, 2023, two years after the insurrection.

       If Musk reverses the Twitter ban, it could provide cover — or create pressure — for Facebook to do the same thing. Facebook (recently renamed Meta) did not say if or how a reversal of Trump’s Twitter ban would impact the former head of state’s parallel ban from Facebook, but pointed The Times to the mid-2021 statements from the Oversight Board and Facebook itself which first established Trump’s two-year ban.

       If Trump did rejoin Twitter, it’s not clear returning to the platform would help him, or his party.

       For four years, Trump’s Twitter feed offered real-time narration of his presidency, with individual missives that would commandeer the daily news cycle. But despite his vast reach – the account had roughly 88 million followers by the time it was banned after Jan. 6 – it wasn’t necessarily a hit with voters.

       A 2017 Wall Street Journal/NBC news poll found that two-thirds of Americans disapproved of his Twitter presence. And in Feb. 2020, a survey by The Economist/YouGov found a majority of voters said Trump’s Twitter was inappropriate, and 65% said he tweeted too frequently.

       “I think there’s a lot of people in his world that would encourage him not to go on Twitter,” said Rob Stutzman, a California-based Republican strategist critical of Trump.

       Trump’s Twitter presence could also have a damaging effect on Republican midterm campaigns. Republicans seem poised to flip control of both chambers of Congress, where Democrats hold razor thin majorities.

       While Trump’s endorsement has helped candidates in crowded Republican primaries, most recently Ohio Senate primary winner J.D. Vance, his tweets historically dominated the news cycle at the party’s expense.

       “Kevin McCarthy and Mitch McConnell, I don’t think, are at all enthusiastic about this election being a referendum on Donald Trump,” said Kurt Bardella, a former GOP communications expert who now consults for the DNC and DCCC, referring to the Republican minority leaders in the House and Senate.

       After Republican Glenn Youngkin won the Virginia governor’s race in 2021, he said, “there was a lot of talk on both sides of spectrum about how Youngkin was able to run a ‘keep Trump at arms length’ campaign.” That blueprint would be much harder for other Republicans to follow with Trump regaining his social media megaphone.

       “He makes everything ultimately about himself,” Bardella said. “If he is able to rejoin Twitter, every candidate running on the Republican slate is going to have to answer for how the head of their party reacts to things. They won’t be able to avoid it.”

       Trump’s allies, many of whom have criticized what they see as anti-conservative bias in the way the platform moderates content, cheered the news that Musk would allow Trump to return.

       “Twitter’s days of canceling conservatives are done,” tweeted Brent Bozell, the founder of the Media Research Center, a conservative watchdog group.