On Tuesday, Senator Bernie Sanders raised concerns about Twitter barring former-President Donald Trump from the platform. Many other international political figures condemned the move by Twitter, such as Angela Merkel, Emmanuel Macron, and Andres Lopez Obrador.
Sanders made the comments on “The Ezra Klein Show” saying that former President Trump was a “racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law.” And as much as we can laugh at these claims, because truthfully, at this point they are laughable, at least he made a genuine claim by adding that he didn’t “feel particularly comfortable” about tech companies having so much power in the discussion. Finally, Sanders can most likely find some common ground here with conservatives.
In January, Twitter suspended President Trump’s account saying that they wanted to avoid further “incitements of violence” after the events at the Capitol. This is despite the fact that the president never made any incitements of violence in his tweets, nor in his January 6th speech. The Twitter suspension came a day after Facebook blocked Trump’s account even though he was still the President of The United States. The actions by big tech have prompted many foreign countries to take pre-emptive measures against technology companies, lest they grow bigger in power than the government itself.
The popular left-wing Senator and former Presidential Candidate clarified that social media sites “shouldn’t allow hate speech and conspiracy theories” on their platforms, even though it is not the job of social media platforms to asses which theories might be true or not. Not to mention, social media platforms tend to let politically correct conspiracy theories run more freely. As an example, the idea that Trump colluded with Russia to steal the elections in 2016 were never dealt with by Twitter despite the fact that it was proven vehemently false.
Sanders said that these internet platforms should not be used for “authoritarian purposes and insurrection,” but that he wasn’t sure how to strike the right balance when it came to censorship. He noted that a “handful of tech people” had too much power and that he was not comfortable with that.
“Yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned, and tomorrow it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view”
