Trump to return to social media with own platform, adviser says

Former US president Donald Trump will soon return to social media with “his own platform”, one of his senior advisers has said, following the permanent ban on his account by Twitter.

Jason Miller, Trump’s senior adviser, told Fox News that Trump would be “returning to social media in probably about two or three months here, with his own platform”.

“I think this will be the hottest ticket in social media, it’s going to completely redefine the game, and everybody is going to be waiting and watching to see what exactly president Trump does, but it will be his own platform.”

Miller declined to provide further details on the nature of the new venture, but said “there have been a lot of high-powered meetings at Mar-a-Lago” with “numerous companies”, referring to the ex-president’s Palm Beach resort. 

Twitter in January said it would permanently ban Trump’s account from its platform, citing the risk of the US president using the site to incite further violence, following the storming of Capitol Hill. 

In doing so the company removed a megaphone that the former president used to broadcast obsessively to his 88m followers, with a mix of vitriol aimed at political enemies and over-the-top praise for his allies.

Trump would often take the Washington political establishment by surprise as he made consequential policy announcements by tweet, sometimes late at night.

In the wake of the attack on the US Capitol by a pro-Trump mob in early January, social media companies were forced to defend themselves from accusations that they facilitated the assault on the building by allowing the spread of conspiracy theories and disinformation by far-right groups, and the president himself.

At the same time, conservatives have argued that social media companies, and Twitter in particular, is biased against them.

An attempt by Parler to set up a platform with fewer restrictions, which conservatives viewed for a while as a possible alternative to Twitter, was thwarted when Amazon Web Services refused to host it. Apple and Google had already moved to eject it from their mobile app stores.

The ex-president last month teased his supporters about a return to politics at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Florida.

Trump was impeached by the House of Representatives in January after lawmakers charged him with “incitement to insurrection” for his role in stirring up a mob of supporters that stormed the Capitol.