A growing chorus of Democratic lawmakers and liberal-leaning public figures, journalists and activists has called on Twitter to suspend Donald Trump’s account.
“Suspend his account, @Twitter. This is pure disinformation. Valid votes are being counted. This is America, not Russia,” Virginia Congressman Gerry Connolly wrote, responding to a tweet by the President accusing Democratic-led states of eating into his lead in key battleground states via illegal “surprise ballot dumps”.
Suspend his account, @Twitter. This is pure disinformation. Valid votes are being counted.
— Rep. Gerry Connolly (@GerryConnolly) November 4, 2020
This is America, not Russia. https://t.co/6XuKMxWagg
“Right now, the President’s Twitter account is posting lies and misinformation at a breathtaking clip. It is a threat to our democracy and should be suspended until all the votes are counted,” Rhode Island Representative David Cicilline suggested.
Right now, the President's Twitter account is posting lies and misinformation at a breathtaking clip. It is a threat to our democracy and should be suspended until all the votes are counted.
— David Cicilline (@davidcicilline) November 4, 2020
The representatives’ sentiments were echoed by other blue-check Democrat-supporting personalities, with some users ‘explaining’ that locking Trump out of his account would help to ensure the “protection of our democracy”.
The president's @Twitter account is, right now, a threat to American democracy.
— Mehdi Hasan (@mehdirhasan) November 4, 2020
For the protection of our Democracy, I request that @Jack and @TwitterSafety would lock out @realDonaldTrump's account until we have a clear winner in this election. #ElectionResults2020 #EleccionesUSA2020
— David Weissman (@davidmweissman) November 5, 2020
Trump is constantly tweeting lies right now, spreading disinformation about the election results.
— Chip Franklin (@chipfranklin) November 4, 2020
Retweet if you think it is time for @Twitter to suspend his account until the results are clear.
The suspension requests follow previous appeals by Democrats, most famously by Democratic vice-presidential nominee Kamala Harris, to block the President’s Twitter account. Harris had made suspending Trump’s Twitter a major plank of her short-lived presidential campaign.
Twitter dismissed Harris’s request at the time, saying the tweets she cited as justification for the deletion of Trump’s account “do not violate our policies against abusive behaviour, targeted harassment, or violence on the service.” Harris continued to urge her fellow Democrat candidates for president to pledge to support for her effort to stop Trump on Twitter before dropping out of the race in December 2019.
Trump and the Republicans have repeatedly accused Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey of censorship in recent weeks, especially after the company blocked users from sharing a story by the New York Post about Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden’s alleged corrupt dealings in Ukraine between 2014 and 2019.
In mid-October, Reston-Virginia-based media content analysis group Media Research Center discovered that Trump’s Facebook and Twitter accounts had been subjected to censorship more than 60 times since 2018, whereas Biden’s accounts during the same period saw zero instances of censorship against them.
