Steve Bannon, former White House adviser in the Trump administration, has called for the arrest of Twitter chief executive Jack Dorsey after the platform put “misleading” content warning on at least four of the President’s posts in the past 24 hours.
Speaking during an episode of War Room: Pandemic podcast, Bannon said that “punk” Dorsey should face consequences for trying to “take down and suppress the free speech of the commander-in-chief”.
“The President of the United States should call [United States Attorney-General] Bill Barr now, today, this moment - what is it? Section 232 of the Defense Act - and send US marshals out to San Francisco and arrest Jack Dorsey today”, Trump’s former strategist insisted, as Media Matters for America first reported.
“I said it on Vice the other day and that interview was from two weeks ago. I knew this moment was going to come”, Bannon continued.
His comments were quickly welcomed by co-host Raheem Kassam, who rushed to agree: “I mean right now. Twitter HQ - don't just arrest Jack Dorsey, seize every piece of equipment in there. Take the thing down. They are impacting this election. They are calling it for one side. This cannot be allowed to happen”.
Twitter Takes Action Against the US President
The flagged tweets in question included Donald Trump’s unsubstantiated claims that there “was a large number of secretly dumped ballots” in the state of Michigan and that Pennsylvania authorities were “working hard to make an up to 500,000 vote advantage [in the state] disappear”.
“Last night I was leading, often solidly, in many key states, in almost all instances Democrat run & controlled. Then, one by one, they started to magically disappear as surprise ballot dumps were counted. VERY STRANGE, and the 'pollsters' got it completely & historically wrong!”, the President tweeted on Wednesday.
.....there was a large number of secretly dumped ballots as has been widely reported!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 4, 2020
All of these posts have now been hidden from the President's feed with a warning label placed above saying that “some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process”. The tweets can still be viewed when clicked on but are prevented from being shared or liked.
Just before the election night, both Twitter and Facebook censored another post by the President where he slammed the US Supreme Court’s “dangerous” decision to allow Pennsylvania election officials to count ballots postmarked on 3 November and received several days later.
With election results still unclear in some key swing states despite Joe Biden's reported lead, Donald Trump has now called to “stop the count” of ballots arriving after the election day, something he had previously defined as “a major fraud”.
The President’s most recently censored tweet proclaimed that “any vote that came in after election day will not be counted”.
It is understood that no such Twitter censorship has been experienced by his Democrat opponent Joe Biden.
