Trump fights to return to Twitter

WASHINGTON: Donald Trump has filed suit asking a court to reinstate his account on Twitter and restore the online voice he lost for allegedly instigating the Capitol Hill riot.

Twitter and other social media banned the former president from their platforms after a mob of pro-Trump supporters assaulted the US Congress building on January 6.

They were riled up by a speech hours earlier in which Mr Trump hammered away at his false claims that the election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen from him.

Twitter said at the time that Mr Trump’s (pictured) tweets leading up to his removal violated its policy against glorifying violence and were likely to cause people to mimic what happened on January 6.

In the filing in a Florida federal court, Mr Trump argued the platform that served as his main megaphone for reaching his millions of conservative followers was “coerced” into suspending him by members of the US Congress.

At the time he was banned, Mr Trump had more than 88 million Twitter followers.

Twitter, the filing argues, “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”.

The suit notes that the Taliban, in power in Afghanistan now and still considered a terrorist organisation by the US, is even allowed to have a Twitter account.

That account appeared on August 8 and “over the weeks that followed Twitter allowed the Taliban to tweet regularly about their military conquests and victories across Afghanistan”. Banning Mr Trump but not the Taliban amounts to “ludicrous incongruity” on the part of Twitter, the suit alleges.

Mr Trump continues to hold a tight grip on the Republican Party and after keeping a low profile for some months, he has resumed holding election-style rallies, often hinting he will run again in 2024.