Twitter Bans former President Trump for Life, Trump Says he is Happier off Social Media

   Even if Donald Trump runs for public office again, Twitter said on Wednesday that the former president will remain banned forever, the New York Post reported.

   “When you are removed from the platform, you are removed from the platform,” Twitter’s chief financial officer Ned Segal told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.” “Remember, our policies are designed to make sure that people are not inciting violence. And if anybody does that we have to remove them from the service. And our policies don’t allow people to come back.”

     Twitter’s initial ban on former President Trump took place on Jan. 8, which was two days after a mob of Trump supporters stormed the Capitol to interrupt lawmakers’ certification of President Biden’s Electoral College win.

   Although Twitter claims to ban hate speech and “incitement of violence,” Twitter’s impulse to censor hate speech and incitement to violence has shown to favor the left. 

  In July 2020, for example, after the Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei tweeted a call for Israel’s destruction, Twitter officials said that Khamenei’s tweets did not violate the company’s rules against hate speech, and instead called his violent, anti-Semitic tweets, “foreign policy saber-rattling.”

    In addition, on Oct. 14, during the 2020 election season, Twitter notoriously froze the account of the New York Post for weeks after it posted a story that accused Hunter Biden of corruption.

   “Who the heck elected you, and put you in charge of what the media are allowed to report and what the American people are allowed to hear?” Texas Sen. Ted Cruz asked CEO Jack Dorsey, at a Senate hearing at the time. Sen. Cruz then asserted that Twitter was functioning as “a Democratic Super Pac.”

    The former president, however, has said that he feels happier to be off social media, former Trump campaign strategist Jason Miller told the UK’s Sunday Times,

      “[Trump has] said that not being on social media, and not being subject to the hateful echo chamber that social media too frequently becomes, has actually been good,” Miller said.

 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)