Donald Trump is reportedly creating his own social media platform

The former president is still banned from Twitter.

Donald Trump is to return to social media with the creation of his own platform, according to his closest aides. The former president was banned from posting on Twitter on 6 January, following the US Capitol siege which followed his speech outside the historic building. Pro-Trump supporters stormed the historic US Capitol in Washington DC as Congress was in session certifying Joe Biden's election victory. Police were attacked, the building was damaged and property was stolen. Five people - including one police officer - died. Trump's instigation of events at the US Capitol, coupled with his incessant publication of false claims surrounding the 2020 Presidential Election, resulted in his ban from Twitter. However, he could return to social media in the near future according to those closest to him. In an interview with Fox News, Trump advisor Jason Miller said: "I do think that we're going to see President Trump returning to social media in probably about two or three months here with his own platform. "This is something that I think will be the hottest ticket in social media." Miller added that Trump's own platform will "completely redefine the game" of social media. In related news, a March 2020 tweet posted by Donald Trump has been linked to a rise in anti-Asian xenophobia. Since the onset of the coronavirus pandemic, Trump referred to Covid-19 as the "Chinese / China virus" or the "kung flu" on Twitter. Academics from the University of California San Francisco set out to examine "the extent to which the phrases, 'Covid-19' and 'Chinese virus' were associated with anti-Asian sentiments". To make this judgement, they collated tweets from the period 9 March to 23 March 2020, broadly corresponding to the week before and after Trump first tweeted the incendiary phrase "Chinese virus". All in all, nearly 700,000 tweets containing around 1.3 million hashtags were examined. The results were alarming.

• The number of tweets referring to Covid-19 rose by 379%
• The number of tweets including the hashtag "Chinese virus" rose by over 8,000%
• While one fifth of Covid-19 tweets contained anti-Asian sentiments, over half of the tweets referring to a "Chinese virus" were sinophobic in nature

Sinophobia is described as "a fear or dislike of China, Chinese people, their language or culture".