- President Donald Trump’s eldest son, Donald Trump Jr., on Saturday complained about his father’s ban on Twitter, inviting his followers to subscribe to receive his emails if Twitter banned him too.
- “Is great technology capable of censoring the president?” He wrote. “Freedom of expression is dead and controlled by supreme left lords.”
- For the vast majority of his presidency, Twitter allowed Trump to remain on the platform due to the news value of his posts, but he was banned on Friday after his followers’ deadly attack on the United States Capitol on Wednesday.
- Visit the Business Insider home page for more stories.
Donald Trump Jr., the eldest son of President Donald Trump, on Saturday led to Twitter to rebuke his father’s permanent ban on the platform.
“The world is laughing at America and Mao, Lenin and Stalin are smiling,” said Trump Jr. in a tweet. “Is great technology capable of censoring the president? Freedom of expression is dead and controlled by the lords of the left.”
His comments on Saturday echo those he made on Friday, in which he said freedom of expression “no longer exists in America. It died with great technology and what is left is only there for a few chosen ones”.
Twitter said Friday night that the president, who during his administration used Twitter as his primary way of communicating with Americans, was permanently banned from tweeting. The ban followed Wednesday’s deadly uprising at the United States Capitol, where supporters of the president stormed the building while lawmakers met to discuss the Electoral College’s vote certification.
Before the January 6 uprising, Trump encouraged his Twitter followers to come to Washington, DC, as part of the “Stop the Steal” movement, which unmistakably claims that Trump’s loss to President-elect Joe Biden was the result of a widespread electoral fraud. There is no evidence of widespread fraud in the election, and Trump and his allies were unable to substantiate the allegation during the months when he refused to admit defeat.
“After careful analysis 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 to violence,” the company said in a statement on Friday night.
Despite the claims of the president’s allies, his bans on platforms like Facebook and Twitter do not violate the First Amendment or other U.S. law, as Insider noted earlier.
While the protesters remained on the United States Capitol on Wednesday, Trump posted a video on Twitter in which he repeated his baseless allegation of electoral fraud and said to the protesters, “Go home. We love you; you are very special.”
—Donald Trump Jr. (@DonaldJTrumpJr) January 9, 2021
Twitter initially suspended the president’s account for 12 hours, but warned that it could take further action if it continued to violate its civic integrity policies and make violent threats.
Republicans have long complained about the censorship of technology and social media executives, whose companies in recent months have taken stronger measures against disinformation and disinformation on their platforms. For much of 2020, for example, the president’s tweets often contained a warning that the content of his posts was contested by trusted sources.
Republicans, including Trump, have called for the repeal of Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), which gives technology companies the ability to decide how to moderate content and protect them from being responsible for their users’ posts.
Republican Party lawmakers have claimed that the law leads to censorship of conservatives by technology companies. Democrats also questioned the law, as Insider reported earlier, because they believe it offers tech giants like Google, Twitter and Facebook a very strong protection against content hosted on their platforms.
Trump Jr. on Saturday also encouraged his followers to sign up to receive emails, so they could follow where he goes if Twitter banned him for violating his policies as well.
In the wake of this week’s Capitol insurrection, a growing number of conservatives have announced that they are abandoning the boat for Parler, the platform that has been considered a right-wing alternative to Twitter, either protesting the president’s ban or fearing that they will also be barred from the social network. Gab, a platform with similar right-wing ties, also tried to court users angry at Twitter’s decision to oust the president.
Shortly after Twitter banned the president, he posted on the platform using the @POTUS account, which will be transferred to Biden when he takes office, but Twitter almost immediately removed the posts. It also banned an account associated with its 2020 presidential campaign.