Donald Trump permanently banned from Twitter

“Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH,” Trump wrote in the now-deleted tweets, adding that he is considering building his own social media platform in the near future.

Twitter shut down his @TeamTrump campaign account shortly after it sent out a tweet with a “statement from President Trump” accusing Twitter of “banning free speech” and coordinating with “the Democrats and the Radical Left” to silence him.

Earlier, Twitter defended its decision to ban the personal account of a sitting US President.

“Our public interest framework exists to enable the public to hear from elected officials and world leaders directly. It is built on a principle that the people have a right to hold power to account in the open,” Twitter said in a statement.

“However, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules and cannot use Twitter to incite violence. We will continue to be transparent around our policies and their enforcement.

“In the context of horrific events this week, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional violations of the Twitter Rules would potentially result in this very course of action.

“After a 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.”

Social media companies have cracked down on Trump’s accounts in the wake of the turmoil in Washington, which led to five deaths. Facebook Inc said earlier this week it was suspending his account through until at least the end of his presidential term. He is due to hand over to President-elect Joe Biden on January 20.

A day earlier, Facebook had barred Trump for the rest of his term, and other digital platforms — including Snapchat, YouTube, Twitch and Reddit — also recently limited Trump on their services.

Google followed 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.”

Apple has written to Parler, saying the platform was not “removing content that encourages illegal activity and poses a serious risk to the health and safety of users.”

Apple gave Parler 24 hours to comply before the app would be removed from Apple’s App Store.

In a blog post on Friday, Twitter said that two of the president’s tweets posted that day were in violation of its policy against the glorification of violence.

After being temporarily suspended earlier this week, Trump was required to delete three rule-breaking tweets before his account was unblocked. He returned to Twitter on Thursday with a video acknowledging that Biden would be the next US president.

Twitter said that Trump’s tweet that he would not be attending Biden’s inauguration was being received by a number of his supporters as further confirmation that the November 3 election that he lost was not legitimate.

It said another tweet praising “American Patriots” and saying his supporters “will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!” could be seen as “further indication that President Trump does not plan to facilitate an orderly transition.”

Trump’s personal @realDonaldTrump account, which has sometimes fired off more than 100 tweets a day, has been used to reach supporters, spread misinformation and even fire staff.

Both Twitter and Facebook have long afforded Trump special privileges as a sitting elected world leader, saying that tweets that may violate the company’s policies would not be removed because they were in the public interest. They said he would lose access to those privileges upon leaving office, however.

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Twitter last year started labelling and putting warnings on Trump’s tweets last year for repeatedly violating its rules, including its policies against glorifying violence, manipulated media or sharing potentially misleading information about voting processes.

Trump still has access to the official @WhiteHouse and @POTUS accounts but will lose this when his presidential term ends. Asked if Trump could create another account, a Twitter spokeswoman said if the company had reason to believe he was using accounts to evade Friday’s suspension, those accounts too could be suspended.

The suspension came just hours after hundreds of Twitter employees demanded in a letter that the company’s leaders permanently suspend his account.

The Washington Post reported that in an internal letter addressed to chief executive Jack Dorsey and his top executives, roughly 350 Twitter employees asked for a clear account of the company’s decision-making process regarding the President’s tweets the day that a pro-Trump mob breached the US Capitol.

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Employees also requested an investigation into the past several years of corporate actions that led to Twitter’s role in the insurrection.

Also on Friday, US time, Twitter permanently suspended a number of accounts pushing QAnon content, banning prominent right-wing boosters of its conspiracy theories including Trump’s former national security adviser Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, a former Trump campaign lawyer.

Both been close allies of the president and promoted efforts to cast doubt about his defeat in the 2020 presidential election.

Twitter also suspended Ron Watkins, the administrator of fringe message board 8kun, which effectively serves as home base for the QAnon conspiracy movement.

“Given the renewed potential for violence surrounding this type of behaviour in the coming days, we will permanently suspend accounts that are solely dedicated to sharing QAnon content,” Twitter said in a statement.

QAnon followers espouse an intertwined series of far-fetched beliefs based on anonymous web postings from “Q”, who claims to have insider knowledge of the Trump administration.

At the core of the baseless conspiracy theories embraced by QAnon is the idea that Trump is secretly fighting a cabal of child-sex predators that includes prominent Democrats, Hollywood elites and “deep state” allies.

QAnon has been amplified on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and YouTube, the video streaming service of Alphabet Inc’s Google. Its adherents were among those who participated in the Capitol siege that left five people dead.

with AP, Reuters