President Trump has revealed that he expects his Twitter account with more than 82 million followers to be banned in the run up to the 2020 US presidential election.
Trump made the comments during a recent interview with the publisher of The Federalist, Ben Domenech, when asked whether he expects to soon be banned by Twitter.
“Yes, I do,” Trump said.
He added that he expects to be banned in the fall before the 2020 election and that he sees Twitter’s censorship of two of his recent tweets as warning shots.
In addition to having his tweets censored directly, a repost of one of these tweets to the official Twitter account of The White House was also censored, two of Trump’s previous tweets have been fact-checked, and two of the memes he’s tweeted this year have been slapped with manipulated media warnings.
Many of Trump’s supporters have also been banned from Twitter with his favorite meme artist Carpe Donktum being one of the most recent to get the boot.
In the interview, Trump also hinted that he may join free speech Twitter alternative Parler.
“Some people say I should join Parler,” Trump said. “Maybe. We do have over 194 million followers, though, across multiple sites.”
He added that he expects Twitter banning his account will hurt the company more than it realizes.
According to a recent report from the Wall Street Journal, top Trump campaign officials are considering moving to an alternative platform such as Parler, building their own platform, or driving more supporters to the campaign’s smartphone app because of the rising levels of social media censorship.
Trump campaign manager Brad Parscale and White House social media director Dan Scavino are already on Parler and Parscale recently promoted his Parler account while tweeting “Hey Twitter, your days are numbered.”
Alt-tech platforms have enjoyed huge growth this year as Big Tech platforms continue to ban and censor their users.
Free speech social network Gab’s CEO Andrew Torba said that after Twitter editorialized Trump in May, Gab experienced its “biggest day” ever with the site’s traffic more than doubling.
And Parler recently had a surge in downloads and topped the News Section of the App Store – an achievement that its CEO John Matze described as a victory over the “tech tyrants.”
