Donald Trump is planning the first tweet since the ban was lifted – and he also wants to return to Facebook | US news

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Donald Trump may start tweeting again soon, a confidante of the former president has revealed.

Advisers for his 2024 presidential campaign have been workshopping ideas for what his first post should be, according to NBC News.

Trump was banned from Twitter after the riots at the Capitol – but he was allowed back on the platform following the hiring of Elon Musk.

Image: Tear gas is fired at a crowd of rioters during the storming of the Capitol in January 2021

One Republican, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations with Mr Trump about returning to the platform, said: “Trump will probably come back to Twitter. It’s just a question of how and when.

“He’s been talking about it for weeks, but Trump speaks for Trump, so it’s anyone’s guess what he’s going to do or say or when.”

The former president also told Fox News that he is in talks with Meta about a possible return to Facebook and Instagram.

He said: “We are talking to them, and we will see how it works.

“If they take us back, it will help them a lot, and that’s fine with me. But they need us more than we need them.”

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0:49 Trump ‘unfit for any office’

Facebook said Trump’s ban would be reviewed two years after it was imposed in January 2021 — with that review date coming up on January 7, 2023.

The social media giant said at the time the ban was imposed that Trump would only be allowed back on the platform if the “threat to public safety” subsided.

“We believe that the ban on President Trump’s Facebook account has significantly distorted and inhibited public discourse,” Mr Trump’s campaign wrote in a letter to Meta on Tuesday, according to a copy reviewed by NBC News.

Trump’s campaign has not threatened a lawsuit, as some sources close to him thought he would.

Instead it discussed the importance of free speech and petitioned Meta for a “meeting to discuss the immediate reinstatement of President Trump on the platform”.

A Meta spokesman declined to comment on Mr Trump beyond saying the company would “announce a decision in the coming weeks in accordance with the process we have laid out”.

A Trump adviser who spoke to NBC News said his campaign believes Facebook will bring him back.

House Democrats, including Adam Schiff of California, told Facebook last month to keep Trump on the platform.

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2:02 What are Trump’s chances?

Trump’s plans to expand his social media footprint also speak to the low reach of Truth Social – the platform he created to reach supporters.

The former US president has slightly more than 4.8 million followers on the platform, compared to nearly 88 million on Twitter and 34 million on Facebook.

Facebook was crucial to Trump’s 2016 victory, when his campaign used computer programming to tailor ads to audience data – called microtargeting – which helped him raise money among small-dollar donors and outmessages. in Democrat Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

An internal Facebook report found that Trump ran 5.9 million different versions of the ads, compared to 66,000 for Clinton, according to Bloomberg News.

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