Twitter Says President Trump Could Be Banned From Platform After Inauguration
Twitter confirmed for the first time that they could block the personal account of incumbent President Donald Trump from the platform once he departs the White House on January 20.
The Republican president, who has been at odds with the mostly-left leaning social media giants, will lose the protections granted by Twitter to world leaders once he goes back to being a private citizen after Inauguration Day next month, The Independent reported.
It said this could expose him further to the possibility of being further restricted or banned from the platform for life if pursues tweets seen by the social media to be disseminating “conspiracy theories.”
President Trump is the second most-followed American politician on Twitter after former President Barack Obama.
Forbes said last week that according to a Twitter spokesperson, the social media “does not have special rules” for President Trump and he will have to follow the same guidelines implemented on regular citizens after Joe Biden is inaugurated as the 46th US president.
Twitter’s “principles & approach” to world leaders states that “if a Tweet from a world leader does violate the Twitter Rules but there is a clear public interest value to keeping the Tweet on the service, [they] may place it behind a notice that provides context about the violation and allows people to click through should they wish to see the content.”
Even before Biden’s inauguration – pending the result of the legal challenges filed by the Trump campaign to overturn election results – Twitter has already been cracking down on the Republican chief executive.
Days after the November 3 election when the media started calling the polls for the Democratic presidential nominee, the platform has been flagging President Trump’s tweets where he often questions the integrity of the election results.
Forbes even reported that 50% of President Trump’s social media posts on the platform have been labeled as “false” or “questionable” by the social media two days after Election Day.
Many of his tweets questioning the election results were often labeled with the clarification that says: “This claim about election fraud is disputed” – even when it receives millions of interactions on the platform.
The Daily Wire earlier slammed how the social media platform has been targeting the President.
“A glance at the Twitter page of Donald Trump two days after the election presents a truly remarkable sight: the sitting president of the United States, as an historically tight Electoral College vote is still being tallied, is being repeatedly censored by one of the world’s most powerful platforms,” it said.
Meanwhile, even before election results are finalized and the outcome of the legal hurdles filed by the Trump campaign resolved, Twitter already announced that it intends to give the US President’s official Twitter account to Biden on January 20, 2021.
Responding to the apparent censorship among conservatives voices and supporters of President Trump on social media, the Republican chief executive has been seeking a repeal of Section 230 of the “Communications Decency Act,” which, among others, protects social media platforms from liability for content users post.
Section 230 states that “no provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be held liable on account of any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.”
Critics said social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Google often use the “otherwise objectionable” clause to rationalize censoring posts and materials that they find to do so.
President Trump has a following of 88.6 million on Twitter, and is among Twitter’s top 10 accounts while the official Twitter account of the US President president has 33.1 million followers.
