Bill Gates says Trump “probably should be allowed” back on social media
One of the world's richest men, founder of Microsoft and philanthropist Bill Gates, has suggested that social media companies should let former President Donald Trump return to their platforms, despite the remarks Trump made that got him banned.
In an interview with CNBC on Thursday, the billionaire mogul was asked if he would allow Trump to return if he were on Facebook’s internal oversight board, which is currently reviewing its decision to indefinitely suspend Trump from the site.
“I think at some point he probably will be allowed back on and probably should be allowed back on,” Gates said.
Trump was also permanently banned on Twitter, Twitch, YouTube and a multitude of other platforms. Twitter removed his profile with the reasoning that Trump’s tweets posed a “risk of further incitement to violence,” following the attack on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6.
Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey described Trump’s suspension as a “company failure,” which set a “dangerous” precedent, reported Rebel News.
In the interview, Gates suggested that as a compromise, Facebook could label posts written by Trump that were found to contain false information. The company had previously slapped labels on Trump’s unverified claims about the election in 2020.
“It’s weird when you’re saying that the election was stolen without any facts there and how corrosive that is,” Gates said.
“His stuff may be labeled as false in a lot of cases,” he added. “In a way, people’s interest in what he says may go down quite a bit. That’ll be interesting to watch.”
Despite the results of the election and the inauguration of Joe Biden into the Oval Office, Trump does not appear to have abandoned his view that the election was fraught with irregularities. In an interview with Fox News on Wednesday, Trump expressed his belief that he “won substantially.”
