WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump’s Twitter account was “permanently suspended” Friday night, two days after his rhetoric and tweets were widely blamed for sparking a violent siege of the U.S. Capitol that left five people dead.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the company said in a tweet.
Just a day earlier, the company had reinstated the president’s account, which is followed by more than 88 million people, after a temporary suspension in response to his messages of support to rioters as the insurrection was underway at the Capitol.
Explaining the reasoning behind the ban, Twitter referenced the possibility of the president’s account, having already stoked the passions of his supporters, to incite future violence: “Plans for future armed protests have already begun proliferating on and off-Twitter, including a proposed secondary attack on the US Capitol and state capitol buildings on January 17, 2021.”
The move came as House Democrats announced they would vote next week on a new article of impeachment against Trump for his role in inciting the mob that smashed its way into the Capitol on Wednesday. But whatever happens with that effort, the aggressive de-platforming of the increasingly isolated president had already begun, with Trump suddenly deprived of an emotional release valve and most vital mass communication tool.
And Google followed up Friday evening by announcing that Parler — a Twitter alternative increasingly seen as a refuge for the incendiary rhetoric increasingly barred by other platforms, and a possible haven for Trump — would no longer be available for download on its App Store, citing “continued posting ... seeking to incite violence.”
Trump, whose has used Twitter constantly over the last four years to disseminate information, announce the firings of staffers, threaten enemies, praise allies and express his real-time reactions to the news, has long answered criticism of his tweets by asserting that the platform enabled him to bypass the mainstream media entirely.
For several months, he has railed about the need to rein in tech companies as Silicon Valley, under pressure from lawmakers, has started to label many of his missives as dubious or outright false.
Just last month, he vetoed a military funding bill in part because it did not include a repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 law that gives tech companies immunity from legal liability for user content disseminated on their platforms.
Although he has decried what he views as Big Tech’s censorship of his and other conservatives’ speech on the platform, Trump’s constant and unrestrained tweets were a defining feature of his “audience of one” presidency.
He often fired off messages on his own in the early morning or late evening without any staff on hand, and delighted in seeing his tweets — which often brought the rest of Washington, not to mention leaders in foreign capitals, to a standstill — splashed across his television minutes after he’d hit “Tweet.”
While his more inflammatory tweets often embarrassed Republican lawmakers, sending them scurrying away from reporters, for nearly the entirety of his presidency Twitter did little to rein him in. The company abided his petty comments on a TV anchor’s face-lift, his racially charged comments about “rat infested” Baltimore, and his threats of violence against Black Lives Matter protesters — “when the looting starts the shooting starts,” he wrote amid protests last May over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer.
And there was no reining in his retweet binges amplifying and implicitly endorsing to his millions of followers the words of conspiracy theorists, viral videos depicting violent attacks on rivals, and even a supporter yelling “white power.”
Only in recent months did Twitter begin to grapple with its own role as a platform for the president’s most incendiary content and the disinformation he broadcast in service of his determined effort to downplay the coronavirus — his retweet of a false claim that there was a COVID-19 cure was quickly removed from the site — and his postelection crusade to reverse his defeat and undermine the country’s faith in the legitimacy of the election itself.
Last year, he animated his supporters with calls to “LIBERATE” their states from Democratic governors imposing strict social distancing measures in response to the pandemic, prompting an unnerving vigilante cosplay of sorts by men who carried massive guns into state capitols in an effort to intimidate lawmakers, some of whom received death threats.
Trump in recent days hyped the Jan. 6 protest rally, encouraging his supporters to come to Washington to obstruct Congress’ final counting of the Electoral College results. “Make it wild,” he wrote.
After his account was briefly reinstated Thursday night, Trump tweeted a relatively conciliatory statement admonishing the rioters and, for the first time, acknowledging that he would be leaving the White House on Jan. 20, as Congress had certified the results of the presidential election.
But on Friday morning, Trump sent out two tweets undercutting that more unifying message, one encouraging his supporters and another stating that he would not be attending President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future,” Trump tweeted. “They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
In a detailed explanation of its action, Twitter cited those two tweets specifically as being “in violation of the Glorification of Violence Policy” that Trump was warned about earlier in the week, saying his language prompted the company’s decision that his @realDonaldTrump account would be “immediately permanently suspended from the service.”
Facebook and Instagram announced earlier in the week that their temporary suspensions of Trump’s accounts would extend through Jan. 20, when he leaves office.
