Navalny said there were plenty of examples of private companies such as Twitter becoming Russia and China’s “best friends” and honoring censorship requests.

“This precedent will be exploited by the enemies of freedom of speech around the world. In Russia as well,” said the Russian dissident. “Every time when they need to silence someone, they will say: ‘This is just common practice, even Trump got blocked on Twitter’.”

Navalny called on Twitter to create a committee that would handle decisions about who can and cannot tweet. “We need to know the names of the members of this committee, understand how it works, how its members vote and how we can appeal against their decisions.”