Trump condemns Twitter for "silencing him" and considers creating his own platform
Outgoing US President Donald Trump on Friday condemned Twitter's decision to permanently suspend its social network account and said he was considering creating his own platform to spread his messages unfiltered.
"We will not be silenced," Trump said in a statement distributed by the White House after Twitter announced that it had permanently removed his personal social network account, @realDonaldTrump.
"I predicted this would happen. We have been negotiating with several other sites, and we will have a big announcement soon, while also looking at the possibilities of building our own platform in the near future," he added.
The outgoing president said that Twitter "has gone further and further in banning free speech", and accused them of having "coordinated with the Democrats and the radical left" to remove their account.
"They have silenced me and YOU, the 75 million great patriots who voted for me," said Trump, who also complained about the protections enjoyed by Twitter and other social networks, which exempt them from legal consequences for publishing third parties on their websites.
The Twitter move deprives Trump of its main megaphone, an account that has broadcast over 55,000 messages for more than eleven years and had 89 million followers.
The social network has already temporarily suspended Trump's account for 12 hours on Wednesday, after the president justified in a tweet the assault on the Capitol by his supporters, which resulted in five deaths, at least thirteen police officers injured and all kinds of damage to the legislative building.
Twitter later returned the account with a warning that "any additional violation of Twitter rules would result" in a permanent suspension, and this Friday, after analyzing the last two tweets from Trump, decided to take that extraordinary measure.
"After a thorough review of the recent tweets on the @realDonaldTrump account and the context surrounding them, we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement to violence", witter said in a statement posted on its official blog.
The social network explained that Trump's tweets, in which he defended his voters and announced that he would not attend Joe Biden's inauguration on January 20, were being interpreted on social networks as "a reversal of his previous commitment" to an "orderly transition.
In addition, his messages "can serve as encouragement to those who may be considering violence (by making it clear) that the inauguration would be a 'safe' target, because he will not attend," Twitter added.
Twitter is the most definitive measure against Trump's speech after the assault on the Capitol, but not the only one: both Facebook and Instagram have blocked the president's access to his account at least until the transfer of power is completed on January 20, and Twitch and Snapchat have deactivated his profile indefinitely.
Many Trump followers are spreading their messages less and less on Twitter and more on a recently created alternative social network called Parler, but that platform has also begun to suffer consequences after the attack on the Capitol: this Friday, Google removed his application from its online shop.