It may be too little too late at this point, but Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) did acknowledge in an interview out this week that he wasn’t too comfortable with Twitter’s decision to ban then-President Donald Trump from its platform in early January.
The socialist senator made the comment when asked about it by The New York Times’ Ezra Klein, who asked if there’s any merit to conservatives’ claim that the left — and, by extension, big tech — have become “too censorious,” particularly when it comes to silencing dissenting voices.
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“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,” Sanders began. “This is a bad news guy. 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.”
Trump was permanently banned from Twitter in early January following the riot inside the U.S. Capitol. The platform argued the then-president’s tweets were directly linked to the events that unfolded in Washington, D.C.
Twitter removed his account citing the “risk of further incitement of violence.”
Sanders told Klein he is not sure how the U.S. should best protect the First Amendment “without moving this country into a big lie mentality and conspiracy theories.”
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“So how do you balance that?” he asked. “I don’t know, but it is an issue that we have got to be thinking about. 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.”