Donald Trump Jr. Asks Elon Musk to Set Up New Social Media Platform For His Dad

Donald Trump, Jr. has asked Tesla CEO Elon Musk to create a brand new social media platform that would never ban his father after the outgoing president was suspended or removed from most mainstream platforms.

In a video posted to Facebook-owned Instagram, Don Jr. asked: “Why doesn’t Elon Musk create a social media platform?”

“This guy put manned people into space,” he continued. “He did so privately. He took on big government and did it better, cheaper, faster than they ever could. This is the guy to do it.”

“Someone like him has the brilliance to come up with something that blows Twitter away,” the younger Trump continued.

“I am not looking for a conservative echo chamber, I want a platform to argue my ideas vs someone else’s and not just people in a place telling me what I want to hear.”

He continued to plead: “Elon why don’t you do that. Get out there and come up with a concept. I think you are literally the guy to save free speech in America.”

Don Jr.’s proposition comes just after Musk weighed in on Monday on the large social media platforms’ moves to censor Trump after holding him culpable for the botched uprising at the U.S. Capitol Building in Washington, D.C. by a mob of fervent pro-Trump supporters. 

“A lot of people are going to be super unhappy with West Coast high tech as the de facto arbiter of free speech,” Musk replied to a tweet of a satirical article by Babylon Bee entitled “Evil Fascist Dictator Censored and Voted Out Of Office.”

The Tesla and SpaceX founder’s politics have largely been elusive, although it’s a safe assumption that Musk’s politics lean to the right given his antagonistic interactions with left-wing Twitter users and his May 2020 tweet where he said “Take the red pill,” using a term that is often associated with Republican politics and right-wing causes.

Twitter users grew curious about what Musk meant after first daughter and presidential adviser Ivanka Trump replied to the tweet saying, “Taken!”

Weeks before issuing the controversial tweet, Musk described sweeping stay-at-home measures by public health authorities in response to the coronavirus pandemic as “fascist,” aligning himself with the Trump administration placing him at odds with Democratic lawmakers and governors such as Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, where most Tesla production is based.

So far, Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram have banned the president from using his social media accounts, which had a combined following of well over 100 million users from across the globe.

In its own explanation of why it banned the president, Twitter accused the outgoing head of state of using his platform to stoke political violence in the United States.

The official Twitter Safety account wrote: “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”

“We made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules and cannot use Twitter to incite violence,” the explanation continued. “We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.”

However, some civil liberties advocates have criticized the move and warned that the suspension of Trump illustrates the “unchecked power” of the large social media firms, which are regularly accused of using monopolistic practices to boost their own profits and crush the competition.

“For months, President Trump has been using social media platforms to seed doubt about the results of the election and to undermine the will of voters,” said American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) senior legislative counsel Kate Ruane in a statement.“We understand the desire to permanently suspend him now, but it should concern everyone when companies like Facebook and Twitter wield the unchecked power to remove people from platforms that have become indispensable for the speech of billions – especially when political realities make those decisions easier.” 

“President Trump can turn his press team or Fox News to communicate with the public, but others – like many Black, Brown, and LGTBQ activists who have been censored by social media companies – will not have that luxury,” she continued. “It is our hope that these companies will apply their rules transparently to everyone.”

President Trump on Tuesday has described his removal from social media as a national tragedy that would result in “catastrophic” consequences for the tech giants, adding that their actions are “dividing and divisive and they’re showing something that I’ve been predicting for a long time.”

“I’ve been predicting it for a long time but people didn’t act on it and I think big tech has made a terrible mistake and very, very bad for our country and that’s leading others to do the same thing. It causes a lot of problems and a lot of danger,” he continued. “Big mistake and they shouldn’t be doing it.”