Donald Trump asks Florida judge to force Twitter to restore his account

Former US President Donald Trump wants a Florida federal judge to force Twitter to restore his account, which was permanently suspended this January in the wake of the Capitol Hill riots.

Trump had then called the people who stormed the US Capitol as “patriots”. “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” he tweeted.

In another, he said: “To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”

Trump, who lost the US election to Joe Biden, repeatedly claimed that his defeat was the result of fraud – an assertion which has been dismissed by multiple US courts, state election officials and members of his own administration.

Twitter called both of Trump’s tweets to be “in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy”.

Also read: Is Republicans’ obsession with Trump taking the party down?

“Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behaviour from this account in recent weeks,” Twitter had said.

On Friday, according to Reuters, Trump’s line of argument in a court filing was that Twitter allowed the Taliban to tweet regularly but censored him even during his presidency by labelling his tweets as “misleading information” or indicating they violated the company’s rules against “glorifying violence”. He also argued that Twitter was forced to suspend his account by his political rivals.

Soon after the Twitter ban, other social networking sites also took action against the former US President and, in July, Trump sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, as well as their chief executives alleging that their action was unlawful.

Trump was quoted as saying by Bloomberg that Twitter “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate”.

Also read: Trump and his cronies are back, only this time Democrats are loving it