After Twitter took the extraordinary step of banning President Trump from his platform on Friday, a stunned group of lawmakers and supporters spoke out.
The company said she resorted to a permanent suspension due to the “risk of further incitement to violence” after a deadly riot on Capitol Hill on Wednesday. He broke out after Trump spoke to supporters and repeated his unproven claim that the 2020 election had been “stolen” from him.
Donald Trump Jr. criticized the action on Friday, highlighting the different approaches that Twitter has taken with President Trump and Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
TWITTER SUSPENDS ACCOUNT @REALDONALDTRUMP PERMANENTLY
“Therefore, the ayatollah and several other dictatorial regimes can have Twitter accounts without any problem, despite the threat of genocide to entire countries and the death of homosexuals, etc … but the President of the United States must be permanently suspended,” he tweeted. “(Former Chinese Communist Party chairman) Mao would be proud.”
The president’s son was probably referring to a Twitter action on Friday to remove an anti-vaccine tweet from Khamenei, but did not actually ban his account. Khamenei said that coronavirus vaccines from the United States and other Western nations are “completely untrustworthy”.
Other recent tweets, in which he describes the United States as “the enemy” and promises to “take revenge” for the death of General Qassem Soleimani, ordered by Trump, a state-supported terrorist that the State Department linked to the deaths of 608 United States troops during the Iraq War remained visible on Friday night.
Rep. Lee Zeldin, RN.Y., raised similar concerns in a tweet of his own and also questioned Chinese Communist Party officials who falsely claimed that the US military sent the coronavirus to China.
President Trump for years has been using Twitter to speak directly to the American people – bypassing the media guardians and eliciting tens of thousands or more of reactions to his posts.
At least one strategist said the ban could be a blow to the president’s future influence on national politics.
FACEBOOK BLOCKS TRUMP INDEFINITELY AFTER THE CAPITOL MOTIMO RESPONSE
Longtime Republican consultant David Carney, a veteran of several presidential campaigns over the past three decades, is currently one of the top political advisers to Texas Governor Greg Abbott. He told Fox News on Thursday that Trump’s potential long-term blocking of his social media platforms would be “a major crushing blow to his prospects of becoming a king maker in the future, because those are his favorite platforms.
“It will be difficult to be a big influencer without these platforms,” he said.
Lawmakers, commentators and others also met on Twitter to respond to Trump’s ban on the platform.
Twitter cited two relatively moderate tweets on Friday for the bans – which prompted Axios reporter Jonathan Swan to note that they were “two of his least offensive posts ever.” The company argued that they were considered in a broader context, including the past two months – during which it signaled many of President Trump’s tweets with a disclaimer on the results of the 2020 elections.
“What happened on Wednesday at the United States Capitol is as wrong as it can be,” tweeted Representative Jim Jordan, R-Ohio. “But canceling the conservative speech will not promote ‘unity and healing’.”
Florida Republican MP Matt Gaetz warned: “The great tyranny of technology is manifesting before our very eyes.”
But Senator Joe Manchin, a moderate Democrat from West Virginia, thanked Twitter for banning the president.
“We must come together as a country to heal and find a common path for the future,” he wrote.
Mark Levin, host of Fox News’ “Life, Liberty & Levin”, wrote that he himself was leaving the platform and asked his supporters to follow him on alternative social media sites Parler and Rumble.
“I suspended my own Twitter account in protest against Twitter’s fascism,” he wrote.
Trump’s longtime critic, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, DN.Y., retweeted news of the president’s ban on Twitter. She separately asked Apple and Google Play to ban the alternative Parler app because of reports that far-right radicals use it to plot “the murder of police officers”.
Twitter, as part of its reasoning to close Trump’s account, said plans for a “secondary” attack on Capitol Hill and other types of violence were circulating on and off its platform.
The company banned Trump’s personal nickname, @realDonaldTrump. His official account, @POTUS, remains active, but he had three tweets removed on Friday after they were posted following the ban on his personal account.
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On the day of the inauguration, which is January 20, the @POTUS identifier will be transferred to President-elect Joe Biden, and tweets made during President Trump’s term will be filed in a separate account, according to Twitter. Obama-era @POTUS tweets have been moved to the @ POTUS44 identifier.
Brooke Singman and Paul Steinhauser of Fox News contributed to this report.