The President can be banned, but shouldn’t be

When the Capital incident on Jan. 6 took place, I almost couldn’t believe what I was watching. I never would have thought that a group of American citizens would storm into a government building in violent protest. Twitter temporarily banned President Trump and many other social media platforms soon followed in their footsteps as they claim that he incited the violence. This decision was viewed as a very controversial one because Republicans felt as if they were taking away their president’s freedom of speech and his views, while the Democrats saw this as a big win as it will stop the spread of misinformation, conspiracy theories and incitement of violence that they claimed he was putting out on social media. 

Personally, I do think that social media platforms should have the right to ban a president from using their feed because they are private organizations and they are the ones who regulate the information and content that goes out. I do not agree with it in this case however, because Trump did not directly call for violence and I hope he did not want the events that occurred on Jan. 6, to result in deaths of Americans. I do understand obviously why these platforms would ban him because of the questionable things he says, but I do not think it is worthy to take away his entire social media and disallow the people who care about what he has to say, to hear him. Social media should play a limited role in fact-checking, verifying or controlling user content from a world leader like the POTUS because they should somewhat regulate their information that goes out on their platforms, so there is not a constant spread of misinformation like there has been. All in all, after the presidency of Donald Trump, the use of social media politically will forever change and hopefully it is used for the betterment of America in the future.

By Jack Montalto