Twitter finally blocked President Donald Trump’s account on Friday.
The company said in a tweet it made the decision “because of the risk of further inciting violence”.
The ban represents a ban: Trump can no longer access his account and his tweets and profile picture have been deleted. Trump had 88.7 million followers before his suspension. Institutional accounts like @POTUS and @WhiteHouse are still active.
It’s a move that Twitter has rejected for Trump’s entire presidency. While President Barack Obama was the first president to use Twitter, he mostly used the institutional @POTUS account and didn’t rely on it as much as Trump needs to get his message across. Trump used his personal Twitter account to stir up supporters and even make personnel changes before they could even make a press release.
“I wouldn’t be here without the tweets,” Trump told the Financial Times in a 2017 interview.
For the foreseeable future, without access to Twitter or Facebook, all plans after the presidency will be broadcast via a smaller megaphone. While Trump can easily jump to another platform like Parler, which has described itself as a less restrictive platform, there, at least initially, his messages are delivered directly to a much smaller group of followers.
Trump and his conservative allies in Congress targeted Twitter when the company was labeling or reviewing its posts. When Twitter first checked Trump’s tweets last spring, Trump soon introduced an executive order targeting Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that protects platforms like Twitter from being held liable for the contributions of their users. and to moderate them. Many viewed the order as retaliation for Twitter’s decision.
Twitter has set specific rules to exempt sedentary world leaders from several of its guidelines, though it would continue to flag or reduce the spread of hurtful messages.
But when some of these Trump allies criticized Trump following the riots in the U.S. Capitol, Twitter finally made the decision many Democrats had called for long ago.
In particular, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had directly urged Twitter’s CEO to ban Trump during her own presidential campaign in the fall of 2019. At the time, staunch technology critic Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., A candidate for the President, declined to take part in the appeal during a debate.
Twitter shares fell nearly 3% after hours.
The decision came after Facebook made a similar call and extended an initial 24-hour ban to an indefinite one, which CEO Mark Zuckerberg said would last at least until the end of Trump’s tenure.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Why Twitter pulled the plug
Trump first saw temporary bans on Facebook and Twitter on Jan. 6 amid an uproar that saw his supporters storm the U.S. Capitol while lawmakers continued the electoral college vote formality. Many lawmakers, and even former members of the Trump administration, criticized Trump for encouraging his supporters to reject the election results and protest in the Capitol. Congress later confirmed Joe Biden’s victory in the presidential election.
As the uprising unfolded, Trump tweeted messages encouraging non-violence, although he later posted a video message that also reiterated his unsubstantiated claim that the election had been stolen from him and told the rioters, “We love you.”
Twitter initially blocked some of Trump’s tweets from the public on Wednesday and requested that he delete them in order to regain access to his account. Once deleted, it was banned from the account for another 12 hours. However, Twitter warned that future policy violations would result in Trump’s account being permanently banned.
In his first tweet after returning to Twitter on Jan. 7, Trump posted a video message calling for calm and coming closest to a concession speech he’s made so far. He said there would be a transition to a new administration. Still, he said to the followers: “Our incredible journey is just beginning.”
On Friday, Trump tweeted for the second time since his first suspension, saying, “The 75,000,000 great American patriots who voted for me AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA BIG AGAIN, are going to have a HUGE VOICE in the future. They won’t be.” disregarded or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form !!! “
Trump later tweeted, “Anyone who asked, I won’t go to the inauguration on January 20th.”
Twitter said in a blog post that the two tweets “need to be read in the context of more general events in the country and the way in which the president’s statements can be mobilized by various audiences, including incitement to violence, as well as context of the behavior patterns from this report over the past few weeks. “
Twitter found that these tweets violated the Glorification of Violence Policy, which resulted in the ban.
The company broke up the reasons it believed these tweets were in breach of the policy, including the fact that its message that it would not attend the inauguration “is being received by a number of its supporters as further confirmation that that the choice was not legitimate “. Twitter also feared that the tweet could be viewed by supporters as a signal that it was “safe” to plot violent activity around the event since it would not be there.
Twitter also said that Trump’s characterization of his followers as “American patriots” was seen by some as support for the violence at the Capitol. The company found that Trump’s claim that backers would have a “HUGE VOICE long in the future” undermined the idea that there would indeed be an orderly transition. Twitter said plans for future armed protests had already spread on and off the platform, including a planned attack on the U.S. Capitol and State Capitol buildings on Jan. 17.
The suspensions of Facebook and Twitter represent a big change for the companies that have so far avoided charging Trump’s accounts so drastically. Executives at both companies have been heavily criticized for unfairly treating Trump and other Conservative accounts, which both have denied.
Now the role of the platform in maintaining the messages of the president and his supporters who planned the uprising is under public scrutiny.
This story evolves. Check for updates again.
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