Former president Donald Trump lashed out at Twitter and Facebook executives in an interview shot not long after both sites banned him from posting in the wake of the violent attack on the Capitol he fomented.
Mr Trump’s Twitter account was the channel of communication he used most often before and during his tumultuous presidency. He regularly used it to announce hirings and firings, to tease new policy rollouts, and to direct his millions of followers to harass critics and enemies, real or perceived.
All that came to an end after a mob of his supporters, who he’d called to the Capitol in a tweet promising a “wild” protest on 6 January 2021 — the day Congress was set to certify his loss to Joe Biden — ransacked the seat of America’s legislative branch.
The next day, Facebook banned him from its platform for inciting violence. Twitter followed suit two days later. All in all, he remains banned from most social media sites, though Facebook has said it would revisit the ban in 2023.
In an interview with documentarian Alex Holder, Mr Trump said it was “a shame” that the two most popular social networks had kicked him off after he’d used their platforms to incite a riot, and lamented that leaders from authoritarian states who haven’t abused the sites in the same way remain allowed to access them. The interview was one of three Mr Holder conducted for a documentary series, Unprecedented, that was released on Discovery+ on Sunday.
“That's what they do, these people are thugs,” Mr Trump said of the people who decided to ban him from Twitter and Facebook.
“They allow other people to be on who are horrific people. I'm not a horrific person,” he continued, adding that he “had a big voice … that had hundreds of millions of people listening”.
