Russian Dissident Alexei Navalny Rebukes Twitter for Censorship of Trump

Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny delivers a speech during a rally to demand the release of jailed protesters, who were detained during opposition demonstrations for fair elections, in Moscow, Russia, on Sept. 29, 2019. File photo via Reuters

Kremlin critic Alexei Navalny chastised Twitter at length for permanently banning President Donald Trump.

Navalny barely survived an alleged poison attack from Russian agents after spending more than a month in the hospital in August last year.

He started a Twitter thread by saying that the censorship imposed on the president is an “unacceptable act.”

The 44-year-old dissident said that appealing against the results of an election should be allowed, and that, “The ban on Twitter is a decision of people we don’t know in accordance with a procedure we don’t know.”

Referring to the ban, he opined that there was bias against the president.

He questioned the decision by pointing out that the reason for Trump’s ban is not consistently enforced, adding that he has gotten death threats on Twitter daily for years.

“Don’t tell me he was banned for violating Twitter rules. I get death threats here every day for many years, and Twitter doesn’t ban anyone (not that I ask for it),” he wrote.

He also criticized the platform for hosting political leaders he considers to be “murderers,” referring to Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro and Russian President Vladimir Putin.

“Among the people who have Twitter accounts are cold-blooded murderers (Putin or Maduro) and liars and thieves (Medvedev). For many years, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram have been used as a base for Putin’s ’troll factory' and similar groups from other authoritarian countries,” he wrote.

This handout photo published by Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny on his Instagram account, shows himself and his wife Yulia, posing for a photo in a hospital in Berlin, Germany, on Sept. 15, 2020. Navalny Instagram/AP Photo

Navalny continued the thread by calling the ban a selective “act of censorship,” remarking that there are people who remain on Twitter that freely deny the existence of COVID-19.

Acknowledging that Twitter is a private company, he referred to how Chinese and Russian companies have a record of becoming enablers for censorship for the state.

“Of course, Twitter is a private company, but we have seen many examples in Russian and China of such private companies becoming the state’s best friends and the enablers when it comes to censorship,” he stated.

Navalny also believes that by setting this precedence, enemies of free speech will use it as an excuse. He said that if a state wants to silence somebody, they will exploit this event by saying: “this is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter.”