Former President Donald Trump lashed out at executives at Twitter and Facebook in an interview taped shortly after he was banned from posting by both sites following the violent attack on Capitol Hill that he fomented.
Trump’s Twitter account was the channel of communication he used the most before and during his tumultuous presidency. He used it regularly to announce hiring and layoffs, to announce new policies, and to direct his millions of followers to harass his critics and enemies, real or perceived.
All that ended after a mob of his supporters, whom he had summoned to Capitol Hill in a tweet promising a “wild” protest on January 6, 2021 – the day Congress was to certify his defeat to Joe Biden – loot the seat of the American legislature.
The next day, Facebook banned him from its platform for inciting violence. Twitter did the same two days later. In total, it remains banned on most social networks, although Facebook has said it will review the ban in 2023.
In an interview with documentary filmmaker Alex Holder, Trump said it was “a shame” that the two most popular social networks had kicked him out after he used their platforms to incite unrest, and lamented that leaders of authoritarian states who did not have abused the sites in the same way continue to access them. The interview was one of three Holder conducted for a documentary series, Unprecedented (Unprecedented), which premiered Sunday on Discovery+.
“That’s what they do, these people are thugs,” Trump said of the people who decided to ban him from Twitter and Facebook.
“They allow other people to be there who are horrible people. I’m not a horrible person,” she continued, adding that “she had a great voice…she had hundreds of millions of people listening.”
–
