Twitter Permanently Bans Trump, Capping Online
Revolt
The president’s preferred megaphone cited “the risk of
further incitement of violence.” It acted after Facebook, Snapchat, Twitch and
other platforms placed limits on him.
Twitter locked President Trump’s account on Friday
after he posted tweets calling his supporters “patriots” and saying he would
not attend the presidential inauguration.
By Kate
Conger and Mike Isaac
Published
Jan. 8, 2021
Updated
Jan. 9, 2021, 1:36 a.m. ET
OAKLAND,
Calif. — 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 favorite 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 Mr. Trump’s personal @realDonaldTrump account, which
has more than 88 million followers, would be shut down immediately. The company
said two tweets that Mr. Trump had posted on Friday — one calling his
supporters “patriots” and another saying he would not go to the presidential
inauguration on Jan. 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 U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021,” Twitter said,
referring to the storming of the Capitol by a mob of Trump loyalists.
Within
minutes, Mr. Trump’s account on Twitter was no longer accessible. His posts
were replaced with a label: “Account suspended.”
Mr. Trump
tried to evade the ban late Friday by using the @POTUS Twitter account, which
belongs to sitting U.S. 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 Mr. Trump, who had used the platform
to build his base and spread his messages, which were often filled with
falsehoods and threats. Mr. 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 programs, 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. “This is the key de-platforming for Trump. The inability to tweet cuts
off his direct access to the press — and, by extension, the public.”
In a
statement late Friday, Mr. 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,” Mr. 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 Mr. Trump for the rest of his term, and other
digital platforms — including Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch and Reddit — also
recently limited Mr. 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 Mr. Trump should be allowed
because they were newsworthy. The companies had rejected touching his account,
even after they were assailed for allowing misinformation and falsehoods to
flow.
Twitter
decided to permanently ban Mr. Trump as it faced pressure from lawmakers, its
own employees and many others, including Michelle Obama. Other politicians and
world leaders also have posted incendiary tweets, raising questions of whether
Twitter had started down a slippery slope and would have to take down other
accounts.
On Friday,
the company also permanently banned the accounts of several prominent Trump
supporters who used the platform to spread conspiracy theories, including the
lawyer Sidney Powell and President Trump’s former national security adviser
Michael T. Flynn. Rush Limbaugh, the conservative talk show host, also appeared
to deactivate his account.
Donald
Trump Jr., Mr. Trump’s son, called Twitter’s move against his father “absolute
insanity” and said the tech companies were overreaching. “We are living
Orwell’s 1984,” he tweeted.
Republican
lawmakers renewed their calls to revoke legal protections for social media
companies, taking aim at Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which
shields the companies from liability for what their users post online.
“It is now
time for Congress to repeal Section 230 and put Big Tech on the same legal
footing as every other company in America,” Senator Lindsey Graham of South
Carolina said on Friday.
Mr. Trump
had repeatedly told allies who raised the possibility that social media firms
would bar him, “They’ll never ban me.”
In the
White House, there was an extensive process for drafting official tweets. But
at night and early in the morning, Mr. Trump composed his own tweets on his
iPhone, often to the chagrin of advisers and Republican lawmakers who then
spent hours or days dealing with the fallout.
“Without
the tweets, I wouldn’t be here,” Mr. Trump told The Financial Times in April
2017.
In a
meeting at the White House last year, Brad Parscale, Mr. Trump’s campaign
manager at the time, suggested that the president move over to Parler, an
alternative social media site that has become popular with right-wing users.
But Jared Kushner, the president’s son-in-law and senior adviser, shot down the
idea later, sharing Mr. Trump’s confidence that Twitter wouldn’t act, and it
never happened, according to a person briefed on what took place.
While the
White House still has official Twitter accounts like @POTUS and @WhiteHouse
until the inauguration, Twitter has said it will facilitate the transfer of
those accounts to the incoming Biden administration. Before the mob attack on
Wednesday, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, was involved in discussions
about transferring those accounts, a person familiar with the discussions said.
The
pushback against Mr. Trump online began on Wednesday after his loyalists, urged
on by the president, breached the Capitol building. In the aftermath, Twitter
temporarily locked Mr. Trump’s account, followed by Facebook. At the time,
Twitter said the risks of keeping his commentary live on its site had become
too high.
The company
said Mr. Trump could return to its platform if he deleted several tweets that
contained falsehoods about the election or calls for violence, which violated
its policies. One of the tweets was a video that Mr. Trump had posted after the
police pushed the mob back where he told his supporters: “We love you. You’re
very special.”
After Mr.
Trump took those posts down, he was reinstated to the site on Thursday. Late on
Thursday, he issued a conciliatory message, saying he was outraged by the
violence and would facilitate a peaceful transition of power.
But Mr.
Trump tweeted on Friday that his
supporters were “American Patriots” who would possess a “GIANT VOICE long into
the future.” He also said he would not attend the inauguration on Jan. 20.
Twitter
said those messages appeared to condone Wednesday’s violence and were likely to
stoke further violence. It added that the one about the inauguration offered
the date as a target for attack.
“Plans for
future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off Twitter,
including a proposed secondary attack on the U.S. Capitol and state capitol
buildings on Jan. 17, 2021,” Twitter said.
Inside
Twitter, employees and executives have debated how to treat Mr. Trump’s
account. Mr. Dorsey has been vacationing on an island in French Polynesia this
week, but called in to meetings, three people with knowledge of his location
said. On Thursday, he sent an email to employees saying it was important for
Twitter to remain consistent with its policies, including its policy of
allowing a user to return after a temporary suspension, according to one person
who received the email.
Hundreds of
employees soon signed a petition asking the company to immediately remove Mr.
Trump’s account, three people familiar with the petition said. The petition was
reported earlier by The Washington Post.
On Friday,
Twitter held a meeting with employees, two people with knowledge of the event
said. At the meeting, workers pressed executives on why they had not
permanently barred Mr. Trump from the platform.
Mr. Dorsey
and other managers, such as Vijaya Gadde, Twitter’s head of legal and safety,
said the company wanted to be consistent with its policies, which state that
users can tweet again if they have deleted the messages that violated its
rules.
But Mr.
Dorsey also said he had “drawn a line in the sand” that the president could not
cross for fear of losing his account privileges, the people with knowledge of
the event said. Mr. Dorsey said Twitter would follow through on a ban if Mr.
Trump crossed that line.
Emerson
Brooking, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research
Lab, said taking down Mr. Trump’s Twitter account now was, in some ways, too
late because the president had already spread so many conspiracy theories on
the platform over the past few years.
“Removing
Trump from Twitter does not fix our politics or bring millions of Americans
back to reality,” Mr. Brooking said. “But it does make it significantly harder
for disinformation to enter the mainstream. And it makes it harder for Trump to
reach his followers.”
Beyond
muting Mr. Trump’s biggest megaphone, Twitter’s decision could create headaches
for the Trump administration when it comes to complying with the Presidential
Records Act of 1978, which requires the preservation of presidential materials
and communications.
Kate Conger
is a technology reporter in San Francisco, covering privacy, policy and labor.
Previously, she wrote about cybersecurity for Gizmodo and TechCrunch.
@kateconger
Mike Isaac
is a technology correspondent and the author of Super Pumped: The Battle for
Uber, a NYT best-selling book on the dramatic rise and fall of the ride-hailing
company. He regularly covers Facebook and Silicon Valley, and is based in The
Times's San Francisco bureau. @MikeIsaac • Facebook
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