New Delhi: Former US President Donald Trump has approached a federal judge in Florida on Friday seeking direction for Twitter to restore his account after the microblogging platform banned it in January.
According to a report by Reuters, Trump has filed a request for a preliminary injunction against Twitter in the US District Court for the Southern District of Florida.
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In his court filing, Trump argued that the social media company was “coerced” by members of the US Congress 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 said in the filing, as quoted by Reuters.
As per the report, Trump also contended that Twitter allowed the Taliban to regularly tweet about their military victories across Afghanistan, but had censored him during his presidency by labeling his tweets as “misleading information” or indicating they violated the company’s rules against “glorifying violence”.
In July, Trump had sued Twitter, Facebook Inc, and Alphabet Inc's Google, as well as their chief executives, alleging that they are unlawfully silencing conservative viewpoints.
Trump Ban On Social Media
Twitter and several other social media platforms like Facebook banned Trump from their services after a mob of his supporters attacked the US Capitol in an unprecedented riot on January 6.
A speech by the then outgoing US president, where he reiterated false claims that his election loss in November was due to widespread fraud, is blamed for the chaos that shocked America and the rest of the world.
Before the ban, Twitter had on several instances flagged Trump’s tweets for unproven claims of voter fraud where he often targeted mail-in ballots for his defeat to Joe Biden.