It’s a step Twitter has resisted taking for all of Trump’s presidency.
Twitter permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account on Friday. The company said in a tweet it made the decision « due to the risk of further incitement of violence. » The suspension amounts to a ban: Trump can no longer access his account and his tweets and profile picture have been deleted. Trump had 88.7 million followers prior to his suspension. Institutional accounts like @POTUS and @WhiteHouse are still active. It’s a step Twitter has resisted taking for all of Trump’s presidency. While President Barack Obama was the first president to use Twitter, he mainly used the institutional @POTUS account, and did not rely on it as heavily as Trump has to get his message out. Trump used his personal Twitter account to stoke supporters and even make personnel changes before they could even make it to a press release. « Without the tweets, I wouldn’t be here, » Trump told the Financial Times in a 2017 interview. Without access to Twitter or Facebook for the foreseeable future, any post-presidency plans will be funneled through a smaller megaphone. While Trump can easily jump to another platform like Parler, which has billed itself as a less restrictive platform, his messages there will be directly delivered to a much smaller group of followers, at least to start. Trump and his conservative allies in Congress took aim at Twitter whenever the company moved to label or fact-check his posts. Twitter even made special rules to exempt sitting world leaders from several of its policies, though it would still label or reduce distribution of violating messages. But with some of those same Trump allies criticizing Trump in the aftermath of the riot at the U.S. Capitol, Twitter finally made the decision that many Democrats had been calling for long ago. Notably, Vice President-elect Kamala Harris had called on Twitter’s CEO directly to ban Trump during her own presidential campaign in Fall 2019.
