NAACP President Derrick Johnson.
Lisa Lake/Stringer
The president of the NAACP slammed Elon Musk’s decision to reinstate Donald Trump to Twitter.
“If you run Twitter like this, God help us all,” Derrick Jackson tweeted on Saturday.
He called on advertisers to pause spending on the platform.
The president of the NAACP reacted furiously to the reinstatement of former President Donald Trump on Twitter, calling for an all-out advertising pause on the platform.
Twitter CEO Elon Musk reinstated Trump on the platform on Saturday, ending after 22 months of what started as a permanent suspension.
On Saturday, Musk posted a poll asking the site’s users, 52% of whom chose “yes” to the question “Reinstate former President Donald Trump.”
Trump’s account was re-activated the same day. Though Musk appeared to attribute the decision to this — decidedly unscientific — polling method, he had said, ahead of taking over the company, that he would do it.
In a series of tweets over the weekend, NAACP President Derrick Jackson blasted Musk for using a “garbage poll” to gauge public sentiment on the decision.
Quote-tweeting Musk’s announcement, Jackson wrote that Musk is “failing our democracy.”
He went on: “Your garbage poll means nothing. Did people outside the US vote? Did you reach out to marginalized communities — the targets of Trump’s rhetoric — for their input? Your followers don’t represent America. If you run Twitter like this, God help us all.”
—Derrick Johnson (@DerrickNAACP) November 20, 2022
Shortly after that, he tweeted, in apparent reaction to the decision: “Any advertiser still funding Twitter should immediately pause all advertising now.”
—Derrick Johnson (@DerrickNAACP) November 20, 2022
Trump’s ban on Twitter came swiftly after the Capitol riot on January 6, 2021, with the company saying at the time that it took the decision “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Jackson commented directly on this, also tweeting on Saturday: “In Elon Musk’s Twittersphere, you can incite an insurrection at the US Capitol, which led to the deaths of multiple people, and still be allowed to spew hate speech and violent conspiracies on his platform.”
—Derrick Johnson (@DerrickNAACP) November 20, 2022
While the Capitol riot was the ultimate trigger for Trump’s ban, before that, he often used Twitter to make racist and racially inflammatory comments.
World leaders were appalled in 2019 when Trump tweeted a thread saying progressive congresswomen “who originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total catastrophe” should “go back and help fix the totally broken and crime-infested places from which they came.”
The tweets were understood to be aimed at four congresswomen of color, three of whom were born in the US.
In 2020, Trump infamously tweeted about the George Floyd protests: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts,” which was condemned by the Southern Poverty Law Center as glorifying violence against protesters and encouraging right-wing extremists.
A spokesperson for Trump did not immediately respond to Insider’s request for comment.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump said on Saturday that he sees no reason to rejoin Twitter, Reuters reported.