By Aaron Miller-
President Donald Trump has been permanently suspended from Twitter “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”, the company says.
Twitter said the decision was made “after close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them”.
Mr Trump is known to spend a lot of time on twitter, a platform that has given him enormous influence to his 88m followers.
Twitter had said that it would ban Mr Trump “permanently” if he breached the platform’s rules again. The ban is the first of of its kind against a sitting president.
The ban comes after Mr Trump tweeted several messages on Wednesday, calling the people who stormed the US Capitol “patriots”. Trump has not had the best of relationships with the U.S social media giant Analysts are speculating the effect the ban could have on the mental state of the U.S president.
Facebook and Instagram have all banned the U.S president from their platforms, The social media platforms cut off a big chunk of the president’s communication channel.
Donald Trump Jr. reacted to the news by taking to his own Twitter account to claim that ‘free-speech no longer exists in America’.
‘We are living Orwell’s 1984,’ he fumed. ‘It died with big tech and what’s left is only there for a chosen few. This is absolute insanity!’, he said.
The insurrection witnessed at Capitol Hill which made world wide news, has led to calls for a criminal charge of incitement against the U.S president. President-elect Joe Biden has shown no appetite to pursue an impeachment, but a number of democrats are committed to the idea of getting the president out of office.
There were other concerns that the president could cause more damage through his twitter account and other social media accounts. Trump has spread an unproven narrative that the U.S 2020 elections were rigged. A small fraction of members of his party share his view, but over 60 court cases lodged by his legal representatives contesting the elections have failed.