Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., admitted he does not “feel particularly comfortable” with Twitter’s decision to permanently ban former president Donald Trump from the platform.
“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,” Sanders said during an interview with the New York Times’ podcast hosted by Ezra Klein.
“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?” Sanders continued. “I don’t feel comfortable about it.”
Social media companies should not enable “hate speech and conspiracy theories,” Sanders added, nor should they allow themselves to be used for “authoritarian purposes and insurrection.”
But Sanders argued there has to be some sort of balance.
“So how do you balance that? 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,” Sanders added.
The Democratic socialist also said he doesn’t like the idea of “giving that much power to handful of high tech people.”
Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube banned Trump from their platforms after the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol siege.
Facebook’s suspension is being reviewed by an independent commission, but Twitter said it would never allow Trump to return to the site.
For his part, Trump said he doesn’t care.
“We were being really harassed on Twitter, they were putting all sorts of ‘flags’, I guess they call them,” he said last month.
“They were flagging almost anything you said. Everything I was saying was being flagged. It’s disgraceful,” he continued. “But it’s become very boring. We don’t want to go back to Twitter.”
