Politics

Donald Trump Is Asking a Judge to Restore His Twitter Account

During his final weeks in office, then-President Trump's verified Twitter account was permanently suspended following the deadly Jan. 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol

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Published on October 4, 2021 03:38 PM

Former President Donald Trump is continuing his quest to get back on social media, asking a federal judge in Florida to force Twitter to restore his account, after the company suspended it in January following the riots at the U.S. Capitol.

On Friday, Trump's attorneys filed a motion in U.S. District Court in Miami arguing that Twitter is violating Trump's First Amendment rights by censoring him, the Associated Press reports.

According to the AP, the filing seeks a preliminary injunction against both Twitter and its CEO, Jack Dorsey.

During his final weeks in office, then-President Trump's verified Twitter account was permanently suspended after the Jan. 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, in which his supporters stormed the building as lawmakers counted the Electoral College votes certifying President-elect Joe Biden's November election win.

In a company blog post, Twitter cited two of Trump's tweets after the riot — one of which included a declaration that he would not be attending Biden's inauguration on Jan. 20 — as a "violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy."

Twitter believed the statement could be "received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the election was not legitimate and is seen as him disavowing his previous claim made via two Tweets ... that there would be an 'orderly transition' on January 20th."

In February, executives for the tech company said they would uphold the ban on Trump, even if he were to run for office again.

"The way our policies work: When you're removed from the platform, you're removed from the platform, whether you're a commentator, a CFO or a current or former public official," Twitter CFO Ned Segal told CNBC in an earlier interview.

"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 them to come back," Segal continued. "He was removed when he was president and there'd be no difference for anybody who's a public official once they've been removed from the service."

Facebook and Instagram also announced that Trump would be banned "indefinitely" from the platforms following the rioting.

Trump appealed his punishment to Facebook's Oversight Board, an appeals group funded by the company which found in May that his ban was appropriate but that the guidelines for it were too vague.

In June, Facebook announced that it would review the ban in 2023 and only reinstate Trump once the risk his conduct poses to the public "has receded."

YouTube (owned by Google parent company Alphabet) also banned Trump's account following the attempted insurrection. The company has said it would lift its suspension of the former president's channel when it determines the risk of real-world violence has decreased.

In July, Trump announced he would lead class-action lawsuits against three of the country's biggest tech companies — Facebook, Twitter and Google — and their CEOs following his bans on their platforms.