Could Twitter Ban Trump If He Becomes a Private Citizen?
For four years, the president’s Twitter feed has served as his worldwide megaphone, a daily controversy, inciting divisions and testing the limits of the platform’s disinformation policies. But Donald Trump’s allegations of electoral fraud may soon fade, or at least appear less frequently, after he leaves the White House: Once Joe Biden is sworn in as president on January 20, Trump will no longer enjoy a few exceptions. provided by Twitter. world leaders are the exceptions that have allowed the president to question the legitimacy of our democratic institutions.
This was recently confirmed by a Forbes spokesman on Twitter , who said the president could effectively be barred from accessing the platform once he becomes a private individual for repeatedly violating company rules.
Can you count on Twitter without the second most viewed user on the website? This becomes more and more possible as the inauguration approaches.
What is Twitter Word Leader Exception?
While Big Tech platforms have repeatedly pledged to root out misinformation, hate speech and inflammatory rhetoric, the issue has met with backlash from prominent conservatives such as Senator Ted Cruz , who has joined a growing list of public figures reporting censorship. This problem was exacerbated by the president’s Twitter feed, which often infiltrated territory that could have breached policy if it had come from somewhere else.
According to Twitter’s guidelines outlined last year, all Twitter users are subject to the same rules, unless the tweet has what the company calls a “clear public interest,” even though it has the potential to spread something harmful.
The company develops the rationale for its global leaders policy:
If a global leader’s tweet does violate Twitter’s rules, but there is a clear public value to keeping the tweet on the service, we can post it behind a notice that provides context for the violation and allows people to follow it if they so choose. to see the content. We announced this in June .
As the company mentions in its guidelines, the introduction of warning labels on some of the problematic tweets is new. For most of the Trump administration, he was allowed to tweet with relative impunity, not limited to the politics of the social media giant. The implementation of these notifications finally came after years of outrage and mistrust from journalists and ordinary users. Unsurprisingly, when they went into effect, warning labels almost immediately sparked outrage on the other side of the political divide.
What will happen on January 20?
Donald Trump becomes a private citizen at 12:00 p.m. ET on January 20. This means that he is no longer a world leader and therefore is no longer subject to various exemptions that allow a world leader’s tweets to remain online because of their value to society.
A Twitter spokesman told Forbes that the company does not have “special rules” for a future president. So how could the final ban of the president end? The magazine explained earlier this month:
The first violation usually results in Twitter blocking the user from accessing their account until they delete the tweet, while the second violation could result in a temporary freeze of the user’s account, etc. (President’s namesake, Donald Trump, Jr., was banned from using the platform for 12 hours after he tweeted a false statement about hydroxychloroquine and Covid-19 in July.)
Keep in mind that Twitter does not have a specific use case for how many times a user can violate the rules before they are permanently banned. But if Trump continues to poke around in the hornet’s nest without consoling the policies of the company’s global leader, he may have to be content with Parler.