Angela Merkel SLAMS Twitter’s Trump ban

"German Chancellor Angela Merkel blasted Twitter’s decision to ban U.S. President Donald Trump. 'The right to freedom of opinion is of fundamental importance,' Steffen Seibert, Merkel’s chief spokesman, told reporters in Berlin on Monday."

"What makes Merkel's comments particularly striking -- apart from her well-reported acrimony with Trump -- is, as @AliceFromQueens noted, Europe generally and Germany specifically have far less permissive free speech traditions than the US. Yet even Merkel finds this alarming," continued Greenwald.

According to the New York Post, Merkel's spokesperson Steffen Seibert said in a Berlin press conference:

"This fundamental right [for a president to express his or her opinions] can be intervened in, but according to the law and within the framework defined by legislators — not according to a decision by the management of social media platforms."

"Seen from this angle, the chancellor considers it problematic that the accounts of the US president have now been permanently blocked."

Seibert went on to say that social media platforms "bear great responsibility for political communication not being poisoned by hatred, by lies and by incitement to violence."

As of the writing of this article, President Trump has been banned from Twitter, Instagram and Facebook.

Following the ban, Trump immediately created an account on alternative social media site Parler, but Parler itself was blocked by Apple and Google from their app stores. Amazon then kicked Parler off of its hosting servers.