Less than 24 hours after having the lock on his account lifted, Donald Trump — the President of the United States just had the hammer dropped on his Twitter account.
Friday, the social media company announced that they have permanently banned Trump’s personal account in response to the “risk of further incitement of violence.”
Twitter went on to release the following:
“In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action,” the company said in a blog post.
“Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open.”
“However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entirely and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.”
Axios
Trump was walking a very thin line with the social media company as of late. He constantly had his posts flagged for posting false claims about the 2020 election. It was also entirely possible that Trump had his account suspended after January 20 when he left office, however, Twitter obviously felt the need to move on the decision now after the far-right, fascist coup attempt on the U.S. Capitol Wednesday.
The ban set on Trump himself also extended itself over to the government ran @POTUS account. Now although the @POTUS account itself wasn’t banned, Twitter clarified that any attempt by Trump to circumvent the ban would result in further action taken by the company. In this case, Trump ended up posting an apparent tweet authored by himself which resulted in Twitter taking down the post.
“As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the president tweeted after the ban.
From here it’ll be interesting to see what further steps Facebook takes who has already suspended Trump from both Facebook and Instagram until the Inauguration. However, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg did make it clear that Trump’s suspension on the Facebook and Instagram platforms could be indefinite.
Snapchat also announced that they too had suspended Trump indefinitely yesterday.