Former United States President Donald Trump has recently filed a lawsuit in Florida against Twitter asking the company to reinstate his account, calming that the platform has violates the First Amendment and Florida’s new social media law.
According to the complaint filed in the Southern District of Florida, Trump is seeking a preliminary injunction of Twitter’s ban.
Trump claims that Twitter, coerced by members of the United States Congress, is censoring him, describing the social media platform as a major avenue of public discourse. Trump seeks to be temporarily reinstated on Twitter while he continues his efforts toward permanent reinstatement.
In his lawsuit, Trump argues that his Twitter account became an important source of news and information about government affairs and was a digital town hall, where the former president posted his views.
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, the complaint states.
The former president used his @RealDonaldTrump account to announce policy and personnel decisions, criticize political enemies, and spread misinformation about election results.
Twitter permanently banned @RealDonaldTrump in January, two days after the deadly January 6th riot at the Capitol building by pro-Trump supporters seeking to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory in the 2020 presidential election. Apart from Twitter, other social media platforms like Facebook, Snapchat and YouTube, also banned the former president after the January 6th riots.
Twitter at first put a 12-hour ban on the former president’s account for repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy after he posted tweets repeating lies that the election was stolen. The platform made the ban permanent two days later.
