Progressive Senator Bernie Sanders said that he was not “comfortable” with Twitter banning former president Donald Trump during an interview with The New York Times.
While pressed by Ezra Klein regarding the claims that liberals have become too quick to censor things, Sanders stated that he did not like Twitter banning Trump.
“Look, you have a former president in Trump, who is a racist, a sexist, a homophobe, a xenophobe, a pathological liar, an authoritarian, somebody who doesn’t believe in the rule of law, this is a bad news guy,” said Sanders. “But if you’re asking me, do I feel particularly comfortable that the president, the then president of the United States could not express his views on Twitter? I don’t feel comfortable about it,”
Sanders also expressed caution about banning “hate speech and conspiracy theories.”
“I don’t know, but it is an issue that we have got to be thinking about,” said Sanders. “Because of anybody who thinks yesterday it was Donald Trump who was banned and tomorrow it could be somebody else who has a very different point of view.”
“So I don’t like giving that much power to a handful of high tech people, but the devil is obviously in the details and it’s something we’re going to have to think long and hard on, and that is how you preserve First Amendment rights without moving this country into a big lie mentality and conspiracy theories,” concluded Sanders.
Twitter permanently suspended Trump after the Capitol Hill riots. Twitter claimed that his Tweets were the cause of the rioting and that his presence on the platform would incite more violence.
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