by Chris White
President Donald Trump wants Twitter to grant amnesty to the handful of conservative pundits who have been banned from the platform in recent months.
“Twitter should let the banned Conservative Voices back onto their platform, without restriction. It’s called Freedom of Speech, remember. You are making a Giant Mistake!” Trump wrote in a tweet Sunday. His post comes amid speculation that his reelection campaign is considering opening an account on a conservative version of Twitter.
Twitter should let the banned Conservative Voices back onto their platform, without restriction. It’s called Freedom of Speech, remember. You are making a Giant Mistake!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 9, 2019
A senior member of Trump’s campaign told reporters in May that the president was looking into joining Parler, a fledgling social media network created in 2018 that caters to conservatives.
The structure of the Parler app is similar to that of Twitter. User posts are limited to 1,000 characters, which other users can then support by “voting” and “echoing,” as opposed to “liking” and “retweeting.” The company is still small. The site has roughly 100,000 users in total. Twitter, by comparison, claims 326 million.
Trump’s campaign, meanwhile, is syncing itself deeper into social media platforms like Facebook to push back against perceived bias. The president’s tweet Sunday is a broadside against Twitter, which banned conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, conservative polemicist Milo Yiannopoulos and a slew of other notable conservative voices.
Twitter has also temporarily suspended several conservative users over content matters. An internet troll that Trump frequently retweets was locked out of his account in May for allegedly violating the company’s rules of conduct. The user, who calls himself Carpe Donktum, was suspended after creating a meme mocking CNN’s Jim Acosta.
His account was restored two days after the suspension.
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Chris White is a reporter at Daily Caller News Foundation. Follow Chris on Facebook and Twitter.
