Twitter bans president permanently
Twitter on Friday permanently suspended President Donald Trump from the site, meting out its toughest punishment two days after a deadly riot at the U.S. Capitol “due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Twitter said Trump’s recent tweets — praising his supporters as “great American patriots” and announcing that he wouldn’t attend Joe Biden’s inauguration— together threatened to ratchet up tensions in a country still reeling from proTrump mob that stormed the House and Senate two days ago.
The tweets “were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 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 visible or accessible.
A little more than two hours later, Trump, using the Twitter handle @POTUS, wrote that “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.”
But moments after the tweet appeared, it was made unavailable. It was one of at least four tweets put out on the account that were removed.
A day earlier, Facebook had barred Trump for the rest of his term, and other digital platforms — including Snapchat, Youtube, Twitch and Reddit — also recently limited Trump on their services.
And Google followed up Friday evening by announcing that Parler — a Twitter alternative increasingly seen as a refuge for the incendiary rhetoric increasingly barred by other platforms, and a possible haven for Trump — no longer wpuld be available for download on its App Store, citing “continued posting … seeking to incite violence.”
The suspensions amounted to a historic rebuke for a president who had used the social-networking site to rise to political prominence. Twitter had been Trump’s primary megaphone, the tool he tapped to push his policies, disperse falsehoods, savage his critics, and speak to more than 88 million users almost every day.
Twitter had resisted taking action against Trumpfor years, even as critics urged the company to suspend him, out of a belief that a world leader should be able to speak to his or her citizens. But Trump’s tweets casting doubt on the 2020 election — and the riot at the U.S. Capitol they helped inspire — led the company to reverse course.
Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. called Twitter’s move “absolute insanity” and said the tech companies were overreaching.
“We are living Orwell’s 1984,” he tweeted.
The company finally acted after a wave of criticism from Democratic lawmakers and Twitter’s own employees, who demanded in a letter written this week that the company’s leaders permanently suspend Trump’s account.
In an internal letter addressed to chief executive Jack Dorsey and his top executives viewed, roughly 350 Twitter employees asked for a clear account of the company’s decisionmaking process regarding the president’s tweets the day that a proTrump mob breached the Capitol.
“Despite our efforts to serve the public conversation, as Trump’s megaphone, we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th,” the employees wrote. “Werequest aninvestigation into how our public policy decisions led to the amplification of serious anti-democratic threats. We must learn from our mistakes in order to avoid causing future harm.
“We play an unprecedented role in civil society and the world’s eyes are upon us. Our decisions this week will cement our place in history, for better or worse,” the added.
“Our decisions this week will cement our place in history, for better or worse.” Letter to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey from employees demanding that President Donald Trump’s account be shut down