President Trump is receiving support for his permanent Twitter ban from a lot of obvious sources. He also has on his side an unlikely one. Russia. Russia’s top pro-democracy dissident, Alex Navalny, went on Twitter to call the move “an unacceptable act of censorship.”
Navaltny made a point that Twitter allows people he considers to be far more dangerous than Trump to tweet away, while muzzling the American president. “Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers (Vladimir Putin or Nicholas Maduro) and liars and thieves (Dmitry Medvedev). For many years, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have been used as a base for Putin’s ‘troll factory’ and similar groups from other authoritarian countries,” Navalny posted in his tweet.
American leaders who have publicly ripped Trump for his role in what happened at the Capitol on Wednesday, feel banning him from Twitter and other social media outlets is a scary precedent. “Silencing speech is dangerous. It’s un-American. Sadly, this isn’t a new tactic of the Left. They’ve worked to silence opposing voices for years,” Secretary of State Mike Pompeo tweeted.
Trump also received social media support from Senator Marco Rubio, R-Fla, Tex Cruz, R-Texas and Nikki Haley, the former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
While calling the actions of the big tech companies a blatant form of censorship, Republican members of the House state the reason they can get away with it is because they operate as a monopoly, with very few restrictions. “The only way to stop Big Tech companies like Google and Facebook from censoring conservatives is to rein in their anticompetitive behavior,” Rep. Ken Buck, R-Colorado said in a tweet.
And leave it to the one brave Hollywood personality who usually has Trump’s back, James Woods, to stand up say something, in this case, his disgust at the number of his followers shrinking overnight.
“In their #GreatPurge the zealots at Twitter have removed 137,000 followers from my account in two days,” he tweeted. “Those cheering the suppression of people with whom they disagree might remember the pendulum always swings. Be careful what you wish for. It’s often what you also deserve.”
Woods later deleted that tweet.
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