Twitter could strike if Trump loses ‘presidential immunity’

IF JOE BIDEN is confirmed as president-elect, Donald Trump would not merely lose his hold on America’s highest office; he would also lose special protections that allowed him to tweet with relative immunity.

While in office, Mr Trump’s personal account has enjoyed a “public interest” exemption meaning his tweets stay online even when they break the rules.

If he were to leave office on Jan 20, he would not be considered a government official and would be bound by the same rules as most of the website’s 187 million daily users.

Once out of office, Mr Trump, who has more than 88 million followers, could see tweets removed or his account banned if he consistently breaks rules on calling for violence, harassment or seeking to undermine elections.

Since May, Twitter has put some of his tweets behind warning labels. The labels require users to click past them to see the tweets and stop other users retweeting them. Twitter first applied the label to a tweet in May, after George Floyd’s death, in which Mr Trump declared: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts”.

This week, more than a dozen of his tweets have been labelled for breaking the rules on undermining the integrity of an election, including one yesterday morning ( right). Twitter applies a

“strikes” policy in which multiple violations can mean an account being frozen, suspended or banned.

On Wednesday, the account of Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former senior adviser, was suspended permanently after he posted a video calling for the beheading of government officials. Youtube removed the same video.

Twitter’s policies on public interest exemptions were mainly crafted during Mr Trump’s presidency, largely as a response to his tweets. But the website has left up some of his tweets saying they were newsworthy or in the public interest. These include one threatening North Korea, a retweet of an anti-muslim video and another allegedly encouraging violence against CNN.