Former GOP rep: Social media companies should be able to suspend Trump, others for ‘boldfaced lies’

Former Texas Rep. Will Hurd (R) said on Tuesday that social media companies should be able to suspend people like former President Trump when they are found to have violated policies and terms of use.

While appearing on a Washington Post live stream about disinformation, Hurd was asked by technology policy reporter Cat Zakrzewski whether he agreed with Twitter’s decision to suspend the accounts of prominent politicians in the past year.

“Look, these companies should outline what their terms of use are, and enforce it, right? And so President Trump and these others have been violating those terms,” said Hurd, noting the “boldfaced lies the former president and other members of Congress have been propagating.”

“So, yes, the company should have the ability to do that,” Hurd said.

Earlier this month, Twitter permanently suspended the personal account of Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) for spreading COVID-19 misinformation. Greene’s congressional account was left up. Greene later called Twitter an “enemy to America” and demanded that her account be reinstated, claiming that Twitter had made a mistake.

Zakrzewski asked Hurd how he would respond to his fellow Republicans who have claimed that social media companies are silencing right-wing voices.

“Well, I think the data, when you look at some of the conservative outlets on Facebook at least, they have way more following than a lot of the mainstream media even when you combine them. So this notion — I don’t think the facts definitely, you know, play out that way,” Hurd said.

He added that the repeated accusations of censorship have eroded the trust that the public has in the media and the scientific community, noting that this began several decades before Trump came into power.

Hurd left Congress in 2021 after deciding to not seek reelection. The former congressman is a frequent critic of Trump, once saying in an interview that Trump’s tweets were “racist and xenophobic” and also “inaccurate.”