Twitter said on Friday that it had permanently banned President Trump from its service “due to the risk of further incitement of violence”, effectively cutting him off from his favourite megaphone for reaching the public and capping a series of actions by mainstream sites to limit his online reach.
Twitter said in a blog post that Trump’s personal @realDonaldTrump account, which has more than 88 million followers, would be shut down immediately. The company said two tweets that Trump had posted on Friday — one calling his supporters “patriots” and another saying he would not go to the presidential inauguration on January 20 — violated its rules against glorifying violence.
The tweets “were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the US Capitol on January 6, 2021,” Twitter said, referring to the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump loyalists.
Within minutes, Trump’s account on Twitter was no longer accessible. His posts were replaced with a label: “Account suspended.”
Trump tried to evade the ban late Friday by using the @POTUS Twitter account, which belongs to sitting US Presidents, as well as other accounts to lash out at the company. But almost all of his messages were almost immediately removed by Twitter. The company forbids users to try avoiding a suspension with secondary accounts.
The moves were a forceful repudiation by Twitter of Trump, who had used the platform to build his base and spread his messages, which were often filled with falsehoods and threats.
Trump regularly tweeted dozens of times a day, sending flurries of messages in the early morning or late evening. In his posts, he gave his live reactions to television news programmes, boosted supporters and attacked his perceived enemies.
“Twitter’s permanent suspension of Trump’s Twitter account is long overdue,” said Shannon McGregor, a senior researcher at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Donald Trump’s suspended Twitter account is shown on a desktop screenshot The Telegraph Picture
In a statement late on Friday, Trump said Twitter was trying to silence him.
He said he was negotiating with other sites and promised a “big announcement soon”, adding that he was looking
at building “our own platform”.
“Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH,” Trump said. “They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely.”
A day earlier, Facebook had barred Trump for the rest of his term, and other digital platforms — including Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch and Reddit — also limited Trump on their services.
The actions were a stark illustration of the power of the social media companies and how they could act almost unilaterally when they chose.
For years, Twitter, Facebook and other platforms had positioned themselves as defenders of free speech and had said the posts of world leaders like Trump should be allowed because they were newsworthy. The companies had rejected touching his account.
New York Times News Service
