Once again, Trump tests the bounds of Twitter’s terms of service.<\/b>
\nCan a president be suspended from Twitter for threatening to attack another country?
That’s what some Twitter users, including actor and former Barack Obama aide Kal Penn, are demanding, after President Trump tweeted Friday morning that\u00a0U. S. \u201cmilitary solutions are now fully in place, locked and loaded, should North Korea act unwisely.\u201d
Critics of the president’s tweet say the rhetoric reflects a threat of violence against North Korea that violates Twitter’s rules and terms of service .
It is still unclear whether Twitter intends to act on requests for Trump’s account to be suspended. Twitter declined to comment on the matter, citing a company policy not to discuss individual accounts \u201cfor privacy and security reasons.\u201d
Nor, for that matter, is it clear that Trump’s tweets actually constitute a terms-of-service violation. While Trump does appear to be sending a clear warning to North Korea, the stakes aren’t limited to a\u00a0legalistic reading of Twitter’s policies. The company may need to balance Trump’s tweets against its own\u00a0commitment to free expression and\u00a0also weigh\u00a0the public interest value of Trump’s unfiltered musings. If Ukraine and Russia\u00a0can be said to\u00a0 engage in public diplomacy \u00a0on Twitter when they battle each other with memes, then it could also arguably be a form of diplomacy for Trump to seek to deter North Korea\u00a0with tweets, alarming as those tweets may be.
Underlying all that, of course, is also Twitter’s commercial need for engagement with its platform \u2014 an ever-growing requirement for its business at a time when our collective attention has never been more fragmented.
This isn\u2019 t the first time people have accused Trump of violating Twitter\u2019s rules. Last month, for instance, he was criticized for tweeting a modified video clip of himself beating someone up outside a wrestling ring. The victim\u2019s face had been obscured by CNN\u2019s logo \u2014 leaving viewers with the impression that Trump was, literally, beating up CNN.
\u201cIf that\u2019s not a direct threat of violence against the American citizens who work for CNN, it\u2019s certainly a celebration of violence, \u201d wrote the Atlantic\u2019s Adrienne LaFrance at the time .<\/p>\n