Twitter permanently bans Trump
Twitter Inc. said Friday it has permanently suspended U.S. President Donald Trump’s account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the company said in a tweet.
On Wednesday, T witter temporarily blocked Trump’s account, which had more than 88 million followers, following the siege of Capitol Hill by pro-Trump protesters, and warned that additional violations by the president’s accounts would result in a permanent suspension.
The White House did not immediately comment.
Hundreds of Twitter employees demanded in a letter on Friday that the company permanently suspend Trump’s Twitter account because of his actions surrounding the storming of the U.S. Capitol Tuesday, calling the company’s response insufficient.
In an internal letter addressed to chief executive officer Jack Dorsey and his top executives viewed by The Washington Post, roughly 350 Twitter employees asked for a clear account of the company’s decision-making process regarding the president’s tweets the day that a pro-Trump mob breached the U.S. Capitol. Employees also requested an investigation into the past several years of corporate actions that led to Twitter’s role in the insurrection.
“Despite our efforts to serve the public conversation, as Trump’s megaphone, we helped fuel the deadly events of January 6th,” the employees wrote. “We request an investigation into how our public policy decisions led to the amplification of serious anti-democratic threats. We must learn from our mistakes.”
“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 letter added.
Twitter did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Twitter on Wednesday initially labelled Trump’s tweets about the election as disputed.
Also on Friday, Alphabet Inc.’s Google suspended the Parler social networking app from its Play Store until the app adds “robust” content moderation while Apple Inc. gave the service 24 hours to submit a detailed moderation plan.
Parler is a social networking service to which many Trump supporters have migrated following moves by mainstream networks to try and stamp out extremism and conspiracy theories.