Fifty-seven percent of voters said they approve of entrepreneur Elon Musk buying Twitter, according to a new Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey released exclusively to The Hill on Monday.
Another 43 percent said they were opposed to Musk purchasing the social media platform.
The poll was conducted late last week and released hours after Twitter reached an agreement to sell itself to Musk for $44 billion on Monday.
The entrepreneur has said that the acquisition of Twitter is a move to protect free speech.
“Free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and Twitter is the digital town square where matters vital to the future of humanity are debated,” Musk said in a statement on Monday.
The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll also showed a divide over whether Twitter fairly shuts down inappropriate speech or if it censors conservative speech.
Forty-eight percent of respondents called it a fair platform, while 52 percent said it censors conservative speech.
“Twitter had a poor image and was increasingly out of the mainstream of America and those who believe in free speech,” said Mark Penn, the co-director of the Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey. “Most of America welcomes the Musk takeover.”
“Voters’ support of Musk’s acquisition sends a clear message: they want less corporate policing and more true debate in social media; they want the digital public squares they have built with their voices to be about political tolerance and not susceptible to political influence and biases,” Dritan Nesho, CEO and chief pollster at HarrisX, added.
Twitter has faced criticism, particularly from conservatives for censoring figures like former President Trump. The former president was permanently banned from Twitter in the wake of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
While civil rights groups like the NAACP have called on Musk to keep the former president off of the platform, Musk has not publicly said whether he will allow Trump’s account to be reinstated.
However, Trump said on Monday that while he hoped Musk would buy Twitter, he would not be returning to the platform.
“I am not going on Twitter, I am going to stay on Truth,” he told Fox News.
The Harvard CAPS-Harris Poll survey of 1,966 registered voters was conducted April 20-21. It is a collaboration of the Center for American Political Studies at Harvard University and the Harris Poll.
The survey is an online sample drawn from the Harris Panel and weighted to reflect known demographics. As a representative online sample, it does not report a probability confidence interval.