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      Elon Musk’s X suffers tech failures at start of Donald Trump interview

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      As a high-profile conversation between Donald Trump and Elon Musk was about to begin, users of X, formerly Twitter, were confronted with the message: “This Space is not available.”Spaces, X’s livestreaming audio feature, was the chosen forum for the dialogue, but it wasn’t working. Clicking on the link to the broadcast, hosted by Trump’s dormant @RealDonaldTrump account, froze the site and rendered it unusable. Tweeters said they couldn’t dial in; some said their browsers had crashed.Musk, who owns X, wrote: “There appears to be a massive DDOS attack on X. Working on shutting it down.” The rest of X appeared to be functioning normally.The interview was due to begin at 8pm eastern US Time; Musk said he would work through the technical difficulties to start half an hour later. The issues seemed to resolve in the interim, and clicking the link allowed users to join the broadcast.When X’s hold music finally stopped at 8.30ET, a rustling was heard from Trump’s microphone. Then silence overtook the livestream for another 10 minutes. Both the former president and Musk were muted. The interview started shortly after, with X eventually displaying more than 1 million concurrent listeners.Musk said: “The attack saturated all of our data lines. We think we’ve overcome most of that. As this massive attack illustrates, there’s a lot of opposition to people just hearing what President Trump has to say.”Trump said he was happy with the mishap.“You broke every record in the book with so many millions of people. We view that as an honor,” he told Musk.The day before the event, Musk said he would “do some system scaling tests” in advance of the chat. On his feed, several of his tweets were labeled “streaming test”. However, an awkward silence descended on X when the interview was supposed to begin. One Washington Post reporter tweeted “So how’d they go” in reply to Musk’s disclaimer about the stress tests.The failure to launch the Trump interview is bad advertising for Musk’s X as a technological innovator, and for the social network as a functional advertising vehicle. The company filed suit last week against its some of the world’s largest advertisers for taking their business elsewhere, alleging an illegal monopoly.At times, Trump’s arguments also put Musk into a difficult corner, for example when the former president doubled down on his lies about climate change and Musk – the head of an electric carmaker – did little to correct him.X has endured similar failures before. The snafu with Trump’s interview mirrors the launch of Ron DeSantis’ ill-fated presidential campaign on the platform in May 2023. That conversation, too, was mired in technical difficulties. The Florida governor was nearly inaudible at the startamid harsh feedback noise. X users said their apps crashed or logged them out as they tried to listen. The feed cut out repeatedly, then began half an hour late with less than a tenth of the original listeners. Musk admitted the event had “broken the Twitter system”.The night of DeSantis’s floundering launch, Trump posted on his X competitor, Truth Social: “Wow! The DeSanctus TWITTER launch is a DISASTER!” Vice-President Kamala Harris’s campaign, which maintains its own Truth Social account, reposted Trump’s remarks the night of the former president’s delayed conversation with Musk.After Musk purchased Twitter for $44bn in 2022 and renamed it X, he gutted the staff, leaving just 20% of employees, with skeleton crews in place in key areas such as site reliability. In November of that year, he reinstated Trump, who had been banned from Twitter after the January 6 Capitol attack. Advertisers have fled amid a documented rise in hate speech on the social network. The billionaire has touted X as riding the cutting edge of politics and freedom of speech. More

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      Elon’s politics: how Musk became a driver of elections misinformation

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      When Elon Musk took over as owner of Twitter, researchers and elections officials feared a rampant spread of misinformation that would lead to threats and harassment and undermine democracy.Their fears came true – and Musk himself has emerged as one of its main drivers.The tech billionaire has cast doubt on machines that tabulate votes and mail ballots, both common features of US elections. He has repeatedly claimed there is rampant non-citizen voting, a frequent Republican talking point in this election.Musk, the ultra-wealthy owner of Tesla and other tech companies, is scheduled to interview Donald Trump on Monday, where they are sure to find common ground on these election conspiracies. Musk is a vocal supporter of the former US president and current Republican nominee. He has restored the Twitter/X accounts of people banned under previous ownership, dismantling the platform’s fact-checking and safety features. Trump’s X account, which was suspended after the January 6 insurrection, was restored as well, though Trump has not returned actively to the platform.“Electronic voting machines and anything mailed in is too risky. We should mandate paper ballots and in-person voting only,” he wrote on X in July.Maricopa county recorder Stephen Richer responded, asking if he could give Musk a tour of the large Arizona county’s facilities and run through the mail voting processes.“You can go into all the rooms. You can examine all the equipment. You can ask any question you want. We’d love to show you the security steps already in place, which I think are very sound,” Richer said.It wasn’t the only time Richer has sought to correct election misinformation Musk had shared. He previously tried to fix misunderstandings of Arizona voter data and rules for proof of citizenship.Social media platforms overall have taken less aggressive stances on fact-checking election falsehoods after an ongoing campaign by Republican lawmakers and their allies to attack the ways information was flagged by elected officials and researchers and how platforms responded.“I think X really kind of sticks out as a place where that change has been striking, and for it to come from the very top kind of just shows how much of an issue it is,” said Mekela Panditharatne, senior counsel for the Brennan Center’s elections & government program.Musk shared a video that used an AI-generated voice for Kamala Harris, which raised concerns that it could fool some people into thinking it was real. Musk and the video creator defended it as parody.He has also written multiple times claiming that non-citizens are voting in US elections, which is illegal except in a few local elections. There are few instances of non-citizens voting, or even registering to vote. In late July, he shared a video of Elizabeth Warren talking about a pathway to citizenship for the millions of undocumented people living in the US. “As I was saying, they’re importing voters,” he said, a nod to “great replacement” theory.Grok, the platform’s artificial intelligence chatbot that Musk has billed as an “anti-woke” antidote to left-biased chatbots, has spread false information that ballot deadlines had passed in nine states, meaning the vice-president couldn’t get on the ballot in those places, which is untrue. Secretaries of state are urging Musk to fix this issue for the chatbot that doesn’t have election information guardrails that other chatbots, like ChatGPT, do.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“It’s important that social media companies, especially those with global reach, correct mistakes of their own making – as in the case of the Grok AI chatbot simply getting the rules wrong,” Minnesota secretary of state Steve Simon told the Washington Post. “Speaking out now will hopefully reduce the risk that any social media company will decline or delay correction of its own mistakes between now and the November election.”Off the platform, a political action committee Musk created is mining personal information from voters in key states in what appears to users to initially look like a voter registration portal, CNBC reported. America Pac, a pro-Trump group backed by Musk’s enormous wealth, is targeting swing states voters. The data scraping is now being investigated by at least two states.Despite his endless claims about election fraud, Musk told the Atlantic this month he would accept the results of the 2024 election – with a caveat.“If there are questions of election integrity, they should be properly investigated and neither be dismissed out of hand nor unreasonably questioned,” he said. “If, after review of the election results, it turns out that Kamala wins, that win should be recognized and not disputed.” More

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      JD Vance is the baby of Big Tech and Big Oil. He’s no ‘working-class populist’ | Jan-Werner Müller

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      Initially hailed as an inspired choice to inherit the Maga movement, James David Vance has fast proved a liability to the Trump campaign: Democrats are successfully branding him as a creepy manosphere specimen; his stances on abortion, IVF and women without children have rightly made him a focal point for criticizing the right’s obsession with controlling women’s bodies. Then there’s the issue of whether he’s really the man to mansplain Appalachia to the rest of us, given that he grew up in a city in Ohio.But one story about the junior senator continues to be accepted at face value: Vance as champion of a new “right-populism” that puts the working class first. There are no policy proposals that would vindicate that image; what’s more, Vance’s career has been financed by a nefarious combination of rightwing tech bros and the fossil fuel industry: those who have no problem polluting the public sphere with misinformation and disinformation and those profiting from polluting the atmosphere. Both are prime promoters of the libertarianism that “right-populists” supposedly disavow.Vance claims to want to break with corporate donors who care only about cheap labor resulting from a continuous influx of migrants. No doubt the Republican party’s promise to reduce immigration is real, as is the cruel plan for mass deportations – whether it will result in higher wages is anyone’s guess. One thing is sure, though: the other supposedly populist policy – raising tariffs on cheap imports – will make the already worst-off even worse off.Meanwhile, there’s no talk of raising taxes on the wealthy, in particular closing the loopholes that infamously allow hedge fund and private equity managers to have lower tax rates than their secretaries. Instead, Trump promises to reduce the corporate tax rate even further.Vance touts Hungarian strongman Viktor Orbán as his model; the latter stands for an unembarrassed use of state power to enforce public morality (no same-sex marriages in Hungary!) and industrial policies in the national interest. But Orbán has also introduced a flat-rate personal income tax and the world’s highest value-added tax – which of course disproportionately falls on poorer Hungarians. If this is indeed the model, America’s billionaires will have no problem with Vance’s supposed “working-class conservatism”.Vance talks the talk of extracting the American right from libertarianism; yet, if one follows the money, a different picture is revealed. His career has been financed by reactionary venture capitalists such as Peter Thiel as well as the fossil fuel industry, who share a desire for deregulation wrapped in propaganda about “American freedom”. Vance himself has worked as a venture capitalist and is now part of a Republican ticket committed to abolishing regulations of social media, cryptocurrency, and AI. The party’s platform calls for a repeal of Biden’s executive order on responsible and, not least, worker-friendly development of AI.The irony is that the great champions of freedom and unleashing tech power are at the same time advocates of monopoly power: they really don’t like Biden’s robust anti-trust approach. They also often crucially depend on state contracts. No doubt Palantir, Thiel’s “big data analytics” firm whose central promise is effective surveillance, will want to be helpful with mass deportations.It might not just be a crude desire for taxpayer dollars which animates Silicon Valley’s new Trumpists, though; it can also be a philosophical vision. That doesn’t make things any better. Venture capitalist Marc Andreessen, newly converted to Trumpism, authored the Techno-Optimist Manifesto, which proclaims a belief in “accelerationism – the conscious and deliberate propulsion of technological development”. What many portentous pronouncements on human evolution boil down to is a simple demand: no restraints on developing AI, as well as an all-out commitment to nuclear power and a weird celebration of population growth as, according to Andreessen, “our planet is dramatically underpopulated”.Without naming its source, Andreessen quotes the manifesto of the Futurists – the artists who at the beginning of the 20th century worshiped technology as well as a kind of cleansing of the word through war – and who eventually became major promoters of Mussolini’s Fascism. Declaring himself a conqueror, not a victim, Andreesen rails against “a mass demoralization campaign … against technology and against life”, which supposedly has been going on for “six decades” “under varying names like … ‘sustainability’ … and … ‘social responsibility’”.The representatives of nothing less than life itself want to step on the pedal – and ask us to simply to trust a self-appointed elite of accelerationist visionaries.Vance might be the first champion of accelerationism in the White House – but he’s also an old-fashioned fossil fuel lobbyist who has weaponized climate in rightwing culture war. He’s associated renewables and electric vehicles with China – his (unsuccessful) Drive America Act suggested that buying gas and diesel cars is the only way of being a good patriot. Passively receiving wind and sunshine is also obviously not for real men; drilling makes for what scholars have called “petromasculinity”.Vance is all at once a nationalistic natalist (“breed, baby, breed!” for the nation), a promoter of fossil fuel industries (“drill, baby, drill!”), and a conduit of accelerationism (“break things, baby, break things!”). Given how unpopular he’s proven in polls, it does not seem like this is a vision for which Americans care. It’s also not the break with libertarianism that pundits praising the Republicans’ supposed turn to workers think it is. But there’s a hell of a lot of money backing it.

      Jan-Werner Müller is a professor of politics at Princeton University and a Guardian US columnist More

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      Do you ever get the feeling that we’re living in a postmodern fiction? You’re not alone | Dan Brooks

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      Writing about the assassination of President John F Kennedy for Rolling Stone in 1983, 20 years after the shooting, the novelist Don DeLillo remarked: “Europeans and Middle Easterners are notoriously prone to believe in conspiracies … Americans, for their own good reasons, tend to believe in lone gunmen.” How times change. Since Donald Trump was wounded in an assassination attempt on 13 July, social media have boiled over with talk of conspiracies, false flags and complex manipulations of state and psyche for unclear ends. After Joe Biden withdrew his candidacy for president, various online conservatives argued that he was actually dead. Meanwhile, otherwise sensible observers blamed the media for creating the narrative that Biden had lost mental acuity and keeping Trump in the public eye – a kind of Rothschild conspiracy for people who took undergraduate sociology.It’s fun to scoff at such people, who believe that powerful forces secretly organise the world even as we confront evidence that human intelligence is no longer sufficient to run a branch of Chipotle. In fairness to the paranoid mindset, though, a lot of events from earlier decades’ fiction have been coming true lately. Consider Lisa’s prophetic line from the Bart to the Future episode of The Simpsons, original airdate 19 March 2000: “As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump.” It was funny at the time. I believe it was either Karl Marx or Nelson Muntz who said that history repeats itself: first as farce, then as whatever all this is now.The other week, Twitter user @ZeroSuitCamus posted a passage from an essay JG Ballard wrote for Vogue in the 1970s (incorrectly attributed to his 1975 novel High-Rise) about a future in which our daily activities are all recorded on video, and every evening “we sit back to scan the rushes, selected by a computer trained to pick out only our best profiles, our wittiest dialogue, our most affecting expressions filmed through the kindest filters …” Here is the Instagram experience and its strange effects, complete with filter, algorithm and night-time scrolling, delivered to us decades before it became reality. David Foster Wallace predicted the filter, too, around page 111 of Infinite Jest, in which internet-enabled video calling makes everyone so insecure about their faces that they briefly adopt electronic face-improving technology, before it develops such a stigma that they all go back to voice-only telephony. Wallace’s 1996 novel about a form of entertainment so fascinating that it amuses its viewers to death raises some uncomfortable questions for any reader who gets screen time updates on their phones.All these texts – DeLillo, Ballard and Wallace for sure, and The Simpsons, too, in my opinion – fall under the category of “postmodernism”. The contours of the genre are still debated many decades after it emerged, but two key themes on which critics agree are (1) characters who find themselves at the mercy of impossibly complex systems; and (2) a sincere effort to acknowledge the importance of texts in modern life, which has since curdled into mere referentiality. I submit that these themes are no longer limited to literature and have become defining aspects of the way we live now.I also submit that it’s kind of weird that we have identified our own time as “postmodern” for three generations running. In the same way that the term “modernism” tells you something about how people thought of themselves in the years after the first world war, the fact that we regard ourselves as “post-” suggests a certain mindset. In many ways, our culture thinks of itself as existing after the important part of history – increasingly, after the good part. Latter-days thinking prevails, particularly on social media and in the arts, which seems resigned to rearranging the material already provided to us.I don’t think many of us are delighted to see previous generations’ satires coming true. Stories about technology-driven anomie and lives that had become unmoored from meaningful values were thrilling to readers in the 1980s and 1990s, but to be a character in such stories is a different thing. At the same time, we aren’t kicking against it – at least not much. There is that postmodern sense that the systems governing our world are too big and complex to do anything about them. We are all in a self-driving car that is taking us somewhere we don’t want to go.The bad news is that the conspiracy theories are false, and the car keeps veering toward pedestrians not because California billionaires are secretly priming the public for mandatory bicycles, but rather because someone saved money by skimping on quality control. Incompetence is more common than malice, even though it makes for a less compelling plot. The good news is that the sense that our world has become a work of postmodern fiction is also false. If it sometimes feels unpleasant to believe that what is happening in the news is real, it is also vital to remember that we are not characters in a story. What happens next is not written, even in outline form.The impossibly big systems are real and in many cases evil, as anyone who has travelled by air in recent years will attest. But they are nonetheless our systems, made and not given, and they can be remade. The end of the postmodern era will come not when the last Simpsons joke comes true, but when we realise the world imagined by the previous century is not enough for us – entertaining and fun to talk about, sure, but fundamentally less interesting than what we can come up with. Sooner or later, we must become authors again.

      Dan Brooks writes essays, fiction and commentary from Missoula, Montana More

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      Bitcoin price hits six-week high after Trump backs cryptocurrency

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      Bitcoin has hit its highest level in more than six weeks after Donald Trump said at the weekend he would end the “persecution” of the crypto industry if he wins the US presidential election.The cryptocurrency’s price rose by more than 3% on Monday to peak at about $69,745, the highest since 12 June when the currency changed hands at more than $69,800.The increase comes after supportive comments from Trump at the Bitcoin 2024 convention in Nashville, Tennessee, where he said on Saturday he would make the US the world’s cryptocurrency leader and embrace a more pro-bitcoin stance than his rival, Kamala Harris.The former president said: “I pledge to the bitcoin community that the day I take the oath of office, Joe Biden and Kamala Harris’s anti-crypto crusade will be over … If we don’t embrace crypto and bitcoin technology, China will, other countries will. They’ll dominate, and we cannot let China dominate. They are making too much progress as it is.”He also said he would sack the chair of the US financial watchdog the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), on the first day of his presidency if he won the election. “On day one, I will fire Gary Gensler,” Trump said, to cheers of approval from the audience.Gensler is a noted sceptic about cryptocurrencies, despite aiding them in January by approving exchange-traded funds (ETFs) – a basket of assets that can be bought and sold like shares on an exchange – that track the price of bitcoin.The SEC chair said in a statement approving the ETFs that bitcoin was a “speculative, volatile” asset used for illegal activities including ransomware and terrorist financing. Since 2023 the SEC has launched more than 40 crypto-related enforcement actions.Speaking at the bitcoin convention, Trump said he would establish a crypto presidential advisory council and create a national “stockpile” of bitcoin using cryptocurrency the US government held that was largely seized in law enforcement actions.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotion“Never sell your bitcoin,” Trump said. “If I am elected, it will be the policy of my administration, the United States of America, to keep 100% of all the bitcoin the US government currently holds or acquires into the future.”The Financial Times also reported on Saturday that Harris’s advisers had approached top crypto companies to try to “reset” the relationship between the Democratic party and the sector. Approaches had been made to the Coinbase crypto exchange, the stablecoin company Circle and the blockchain payments group Ripple Labs, the FT said. More

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      Elon Musk attends Netanyahu’s congressional address as his guest

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      Elon Musk attended Benjamin Netanyahu’s address to Congress on Wednesday as a guest of the embattled Israeli prime minister.A day earlier, the tech billionaire announced that his Starlink internet service was now active in a Gaza hospital, with the support of Israel’s government.Netanyahu’s congressional visit was met with thousands of protesters gathering near Capitol Hill to demonstrate against Israeli abuses during its war in Gaza. Lawmakers were divided over whether he should have been invited to speak.Musk has a history of courting rightwing leaders in countries that have overlapping business interests with his various enterprises. He previously hosted Javier Millei, Argentina’s president, at his Tesla factory and has been a cheerleader for his policies, while also cozying up to Narendra Modi, India’s prime minister, and Jair Bolsonaro, the former Brazilian president.Musk previously met with Netanyahu during a visit to Israel last year, as the tech leader sought to quell accusations of antisemitism after personally endorsing a post on his social network X, formerly Twitter, that claimed Jews hate white people. Far-right content on the platform has also increased.Musk’s visit also appears to have helped pave the way for SpaceX to provide its Starlink satellite internet to Gaza, which he announced on Tuesday was now in service at a hospital. The single location, which was supported by Israel and the United Arab Emirates, also reflects the tight controls that Israel has put on communications technology in the area.In recent weeks, Musk has also thrown his support behind Donald Trump’s election campaign and played a direct role in advising the former president to select JD Vance, Ohio senator, as his running mate.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionAlthough Musk has continued to post conservative content and attacks against the presumptive Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, he appears to have tempered some of his support for Trump following Joe Biden dropping out of the race. Musk pushed back against a report he was set to donate $45m per month to a pro-Trump political action committee.Musk’s appearance as a guest of Netanyahu further aligns him with the Republican party line, which has thrown its support behind the Israeli leader as many Democrats condemn his actions. A number of progressive Democratic lawmakers declined to attend Netanyahu’s speech, with New York representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez denouncing him as a “war criminal”. More

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      How JD Vance’s path to being Trump’s VP pick wound through Silicon Valley

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      When JD Vance was a student at Yale Law School in 2011, he attended a talk featuring Peter Thiel, the conservative tech billionaire. Although Vance didn’t know Thiel at the time, over the next decade he would become Thiel’s employee, friend and the recipient of his largesse. Thiel’s millions paved the way for Vance to become a senator.Thiel’s talk was “the most significant moment of my time at Yale Law School”, Vance would write in a 2020 essay for The Lamp, a Catholic magazine. In Vance’s telling, Thiel’s talk of the failures of elite institutions and belief in Christianity made him reconsider his own faith and immediately make plans for a career outside of law – one that wound through the worlds of tech and venture capital before politics.skip past newsletter promotionafter newsletter promotionWhile Vance is best known for the hardscrabble origin story he laid out in his memoir Hillbilly Elegy, in the years following his graduation from Yale he developed extensive ties with Silicon Valley’s investors and elites. His time as a venture capitalist, coupled with his status as a rags-to-riches media fixture, helped him make connections central to his political rise, as well as garner him influential supporters that pushed Trump to make him his vice presidential pick.Following a brief period of work in corporate law after he graduated Yale, Vance moved to San Francisco and got a job at Thiel’s Mithril Capital venture firm in 2015. After Hillbilly Elegy became a bestseller in 2016 and brought him to national prominence, Vance joined the venture capital firm Revolution, founded by the former AOL CEO Steve Case.Vance remained a part of the tech VC world after returning to Ohio and leaving Revolution in early 2020. He received financial backing from Thiel to co-found the venture firm Narya Capital – which, like Thiel’s enterprises, was named after an object from The Lord of The Rings, this time a ring of power made for elves. Other prominent investors in Narya included Eric Schmidt, the former Google CEO,and Marc Andreessen, a venture capitalist, who announced his own support for Trump this past week. The stated goal of Vance’s firm was to invest in early-stage startups in cities that Silicon Valley tended to overlook.Narya Capital in 2021 led a group of conservative investors, including Thiel, to put money into Rumble, the video streaming platform that positions itself as a less-moderated and more rightwing friendly version of YouTube. Vance’s co-founder at Narya, Colin Greenspon, touted the investment as a challenge to big tech’s hold on online services – a frequent conservative talking point during the backlash to content moderation around the pandemic and 2020 presidential election. It was also around this time that Thiel, who heavily backed Trump financially during the 2016 campaign, brought Vance to first talk with Trump during a secretive meeting at Mar-a-Lago in February of 2021, according to the New York Times.Vance’s long association with Thiel also proved lucrative during his run for senator in 2022. Thiel put a staggering $15m into Vance’s campaign and, according to the Washington Post, helped court Trump’s endorsement, leading to Vance winning a tightly contested Republican primary race and then the senate election.Although Thiel has pledged in recent years to stay out of donations to the 2024 election, Vance has since flexed his other Silicon Valley connections to ingratiate himself to Trump. The Ohio senator introduced David Sacks, a prominent venture capitalist, to Donald Trump Jr in March, the New York Times reported, and attended Sacks’ pro-Trump fundraiser in June, co-sponsored by Chamath Palihapitiya, Sacks’ co-host on the popular podcast All In. The event, which cost as much as $300,000 to attend, was held at Sacks’s San Francisco mansion and featured the investor thanking Vance for his help making the fundraiser happen. During an informal conversation at the dinner, Sacks and Palihapitiya told Trump to nominate Vance as his VP choice.Sacks spoke at the Republican national convention Monday. In the days prior, he had also called Trump to advocate for Vance as the VP pick, as had Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, the ex-Fox News host, according to Axios. Thiel also expressed his support for Vance in private calls with Trump, the New York Times reported. When Trump confirmed Vance would be his running mate, Sacks and Musk posted fawning celebrations on Twitter – with Musk saying the ticket “resounds with victory”.Many of Vance’s wealthy tech elite and venture capitalist supporters now appear to be preparing to offer even more tangible support. Investors including Musk, Andreessen and Thiel’s co-founder in Palantir, Joe Lonsdale, are all reportedly planning to donate huge sums of money to back the Trump and Vance campaign. More

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      Meta lifts restrictions on Trump’s Facebook and Instagram accounts

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      Meta has removed previous restrictions on the Facebook and Instagram accounts of Donald Trump as the 2024 election nears, the company announced on Friday.Trump was allowed to return to the social networks in 2023 with “guardrails” in place, after being banned over his online behavior during the 6 January insurrection. Those guardrails have now been removed.“In assessing our responsibility to allow political expression, we believe that the American people should be able to hear from the nominees for president on the same basis,” Meta said in a blogpost, citing the Republican national convention, slated for next week, which will formalize Trump as the party’s candidate.As a result, Meta said, Trump’s accounts will no longer be subject to heightened suspension penalties, which Meta said were created in response to “extreme and extraordinary circumstances” and “have not had to be deployed”.“All US presidential candidates remain subject to the same community standards as all Facebook and Instagram users, including those policies designed to prevent hate speech and incitement to violence,” the company’s blogpost reads.Since his return to Meta’s social networks, Trump has primarily shared campaign information, attacks on Democratic candidate Biden, and memes on his accounts.Critics of Trump and online safety advocates have expressed concern that Trump’s return could lead to a rise of misinformation and incitement of violence, as was seen during the Capitol riot that prompted his initial ban.The Biden campaign condemned Meta’s decision in a statement on Friday, saying it is a “greedy, reckless decision” that constitutes “ a direct attack on our safety and our democracy”.“Restoring his access is like handing your car keys to someone you know will drive your car into a crowd and off a cliff,” said campaign spokesperson Charles Kretchmer Lutvak. “It is holding a megaphone for a bonafide racist who will shout his hate and white supremacy from the rooftops and try to take it mainstream.”In addition to Meta platforms, other major social media firms banned Trump due to his online activity surrounding the 6 January attack, including Twitter (now X), Snapchat and YouTube.The former president was allowed back on X last year by the decision of Elon Musk, who bought the company in 2022, though the former president has not yet tweeted.Trump returned to YouTube in March 2023. He remains banned from Snapchat.Trump founded his own social network, Truth Social, in early 2022. More