Former US President Donald Trump has appealed to a federal judge in Florida to force Twitter to restore his account, Reuters reported.

Donald Trump’s Twitter account was permanently suspended in January this year after the Capitol Hill riots on January 6. Other social media companies followed suit and took action against him.

In July, Donald Trump sued Twitter, Facebook and Google, as well as their chief executives. He alleged that their action against him was unlawful. In Florida, Trump filed a request for a preliminary injunction against Twitter and argued that Twitter was coerced by US Congress members to suspend his account.

Twitter “exercises a degree of power and control over political discourse in this country that is immeasurable, historically unprecedented, and profoundly dangerous to open democratic debate,” Trump’s lawyers stated.

‘TALIBAN ALLOWED, TRUMP CENSORED’

Importantly, Donald Trump argued in his filing that Twitter had allowed the Taliban to tweet regularly but censored him. He claimed that Twitter censored him even during his presidency by labelling his tweets as “misleading information” or indicating they violated the company’s rules against “glorifying violence”, Reuters reported.

On January 8, Twitter had said that after a close review of the recent tweets from Donald Trump’s account, the company took the decision to permanently suspend the account due to the risk of further “incitement of violence”.

“Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behaviour from this account in recent weeks,” Twitter had said.

(With inputs from Reuters)

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