Donald Trump has called Twitter and Facebook “boring” and suggested he’s not yet willing to return to the social media platforms, instead arguing that his own platform Truth Social is doing well.
“I’ve been invited back,” he told the Just the News, No Noise programme on the rightwing broadcaster Real America’s Voice on Monday. “It’s waiting, I guess. Twitter has close to 90 million people waiting. But I think I get a very strong word out on Truth, and there’s something very beautiful about it.”
The former president was suspended from Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook after the January 6, 2021 insurrection when a mob of his supporters laid siege to the US Congress in a failed attempt to block the certification of President Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
Mr Trump then started his own platform and appointed former California Republican Representative Devin Nunes to be the CEO of its parent company – the Trump Media and Technology Group.
“They want me back so badly on Twitter,” Mr Trump claimed on Monday. “They want me back on Google. They want us back badly on Facebook.”
He was reinstated on Twitter following its takeover by Tesla CEO and SpaceX founder Elon Musk.
“They do want us back badly,” Mr Trump said. “And they’ve made it open. But it’s become boring. You know, it’s boring. You have fake accounts. You have bots. TRUTH doesn’t have that.”
“They treated us very badly,” he argued. “You can’t help but remember that. If you don’t remember that, you’re very foolish. And I don’t like to be foolish. So we’ll see what happens.”
Mr Trump was reinstated on Twitter in November of last year but has yet to return to the platform.
Before Mr Musk took over Twitter, Mr Trump’s ban from the platform for inciting violence in relation to the insurrection appeared to have been permanent.
“The people have spoken,” Mr Musk wrote on 19 November. “Trump will be reinstated.”
He added: “Vox Populi, Vox Dei” – which is a Latin phrase meaning: “The voice of the people is the voice of God.”
Not long after the announcement, Mr Trump’s account was once again visible on Twitter and all of his past posts could be viewed again.
In his last tweet, posted on 8 January 2021, Mr Trump wrote, “to all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the inauguration on January 20th”.
The research director of the Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, Joan Donovan, told CNN in January that “usually these companies do fly in a flock and whoever makes the first movements, other companies do tend to try to, in succession, follow behind because the initial company takes the biggest media hit and then the rest of them don’t suffer the reputational hit of being the first technology company to make a decision”.
The President of Global Affairs of Facebook, former UK Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg, said last month when Facebook parent company Meta announced that Mr Trump would be allowed to return to the platform that “in the event that Mr Trump posts further violating content, the content will be removed and he will be suspended for between one month and two years, depending on the severity of the violation”.
