Senator Bernie Sanders speaks to the media in Burlington, Vermont, March 11, 2020.
Vermont Democratic Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) expressed his reservations about the Twitter ban on former President Donald Trump, saying he doesn’t like the idea of a “small group of high-tech people” having too much power.
Sanders made the remarks in an interview with the New York Times. In the interview, Sanders was asked about Twitter’s ban on Trump’s presence on its platform.
Sanders replied, “Do I feel particularly comfortable that the then-president of the United States can’t tweet his views? I was uncomfortable with that.”
Trump was blocked from the social media platform following the Jan. 6 break-in at the Capitol. A week later, Twitter CEO Jack Dempsey defended the decision in a series of tweets.
Dempsey wrote: “I’m neither celebratory (about it) nor proud that we had to ban Trump’s account on Twitter and have no idea how we got to this point.” “We took this action after being clearly warned, and we made the decision using the best information we had based on the threat to personal safety posed by the information on Twitter.”
He added, “I think it was the right decision for Twitter. We were faced with an extraordinary and volatile situation that forced us to focus all of our actions on public safety. The harm caused by online speech offline is clearly real and is the most important, driving factor in our policies and enforcement measures.”
Trump said Monday (March 22) that Twitter and Facebook, two sites that have hurt him, have also “done him a favor.”
The former president told Newsmax that he enjoys his Time off from social media and that he enjoys issuing press releases and communicating with the public via email.
“I’ll put out press releases,” Trump said. “Frankly, they’re more elegant than tweets. As the word suggests, they’re really more elegant, and the word has gotten around.”
Trump declined to confirm rumors that he plans to launch his own social media platform.
Trump said, “We have a lot of options, and if I want that to happen, something will happen with social media.” He also said he has “tremendous options” for launching a viable social media platform, given the large following he had before the ban was enacted.
In an interview with Fox News on Sunday (March 21), Trump’s senior adviser Jason Miller said, “I do think we’re going to see President Trump return to social media in about two or three months and have his own platform.”
While there are no details on what Trump’s social media platform will look like, the former president’s embrace of free speech suggests that it is unlikely to be a platform that suppresses controversial content.
In an interview with Klein, Sanders said he does not have a solution that balances free speech with regulating posts that could be harmful.
I don’t know what the answer is,” Sanders said. Do you want hate speech and conspiracy theories spreading across the country? No!”
He added, “But it’s an issue we have to consider. Because yesterday it was Donald Trump who was blocked, and tomorrow, it could be another person who holds a completely different view.”
Many Republicans and others have accused large tech platforms such as Facebook and Twitter of using various tactics to silence conservative voices and support leftist views.
The tech giants’ social platforms have repeatedly denied any bias, saying they are impartially trying to balance fiercely polarized opposing voices. Some of these voices can be silenced if terms of use and content policies are violated.
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