The Republican leader said he would use his own website, Truth Social, though since it launched in February he only appears to have posted there once.
“I’m not going to Twitter, I’m going to stay on Truth,” Trump told Fox News, referring to the platform created as a conservative alternative to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.
“I hope that Elon buys Twitter because it will improve it and he is a good man, but I am staying with Truth,” he repeated.
“We are receiving millions of people, and what we are seeing is that the response on Truth is much better than being on Twitter. Twitter has bots and fake accounts,” he explained to the network.
Twitter deleted Trump’s account, which had almost 89 million followers, on January 8, 2021, citing the risk of inciting violence in the messages of the then US president.
Two days earlier, thousands of supporters of the Republican billionaire had violently attacked the Capitol in Washington to prevent lawmakers from certifying the victory of Democrat Joe Biden in the November 2020 presidential election.
Musk, the world’s richest man, reached a deal on Monday to buy Twitter for $44 billion, which will give him control of one of the most influential social networks on the planet, founded in 2006.
The California-based microblogging platform has come under fire from conservatives, who have accused it of biasing against them and violating their free speech rights through suspensions for breaking the rules.
Lawmakers have called for the modification or repeal of a 1996 law that protects social media platforms from liability for their content moderation practices and for third-party posts.
Musk, whose immense wealth stems from the popularity of electric vehicles from Tesla as well as other companies such as SpaceX, has been a self-proclaimed “free speech absolutist” and is expected to take a looser approach to regulating content.
The progressive group Media Matters for America warned that Trump could return to Twitter and called for maintaining current standards.
“Any negotiations to sell Twitter to Musk must include clear enforceable mechanisms to uphold and uphold existing community standards, including removing those who violate those standards,” the group’s president, Angelo Carusone, said in a statement.
More than a million users downloaded Trump’s app, Truth Social, after it launched, but interest appears to have waned amid technical glitches and long wait times to access accounts.
