Germany’s Chancellor Angela Merkel calls Trump Twitter ban ‘problematic’
German Chancellor Angela Merkel considers it “problematic” that Twitter would toss President Trump off its social media platform, saying through a spokesman Monday that the president’s ability to express his opinion is a fundamental right of “elementary significance.”
“This fundamental right can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators — not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms,” Merkel spokesman Steffen Seibert told reporters in Berlin.
“Seen from this angle, the chancellor considers it problematic that the accounts of the US president have now been permanently blocked,” he added.
Twitter permanently banned Trump’s Twitter account last Friday, citing “the risk of further incitement of violence” — two days after a mob of his supporters stormed the Capitol.
But for weeks the social media platform had tagged the president’s tweets about the Nov. 3 presidential election.
Seibert said Twitter and other platforms like Facebook and Google have a right to flag content they consider objectionable, but they also “bear great responsibility for political communication not being poisoned by hatred, by lies and by incitement to violence.”
Facebook last week banned Trump until after he leaves office on Jan. 20.
Thousands of Trump’s supporters have turned to the social media website Parler in the past year, and after the president was blocked, hoping to find a site where they could air their views uncensored, but it went offline Monday after Amazon kicked Parler off its servers.
The action by Amazon Web Services comes after Apple and Google pulled the app from their stores over the weekend.
With Post wires