Former president Donald Trump said he isn’t interested in returning to Twitter any time soon.
Trump was banned from Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and several other Big Tech publishers following the Jan. 6 uprising at the US Capitol, but Trump said it’s been helpful for him to stay quiet.
“I really wanted to be somewhat quiet,” Trump told Newsmax on Wednesday. “It hasn’t been that quiet, frankly, but I wanted to be somewhat quiet.”
He added that joining a conservative platform is not off the table, and even suggested he might launch his own social-media company.
“They really wanted me on Parler,” he said.
“You know I had 89 million followers, but that was because they held it back—and then, on top of that, I had 36 million or 39 million on @POTUS and we had other sites where we had millions and millions of people, so we have, I guess, about as big as it gets,” he continued. “And, likewise, on Facebook—and they all want that, and part of the problem is, mechanically, they can’t handle it because it’s too many people, it’s bigger than they are by many times.”
Trump argued his departure has hurt Twitter, saying “millions” of users have left the platform in recent weeks.
“And I’ll tell you it’s not the same. If you look at what’s going on with Twitter. I understand it’s become very boring and millions of people are leaving, they’re leaving it because it’s not the same and I can understand that,” he said.
When asked whether he might launch his own social media company, Trump said: “We’ll see what happens. We’re negotiating with a number of people and there is also the other option of building your own… you can literally build your own site.”
Trump is certain of one thing, though: He’s not going back to Twitter.
“We were being really harassed on Twitter, they were putting all sorts of ‘flags’, I guess they call them,” he said.
“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.”
