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Big tech companies like Facebook and Twitter are banning President Trump from using their platforms. Sara Fischer, Media Reporter at Axios, joins Worldwide Exchange to discuss what this means for the companies’ reputations and for regulatory implications. Subscribe to CNBC PRO for access to investor and analyst insights on tech and more: https://cnb.cx/3dIH56N
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.”
Twitter said it feared Trump’s most recent tweets were being interpreted as supporting the rioters and that plans for future armed protests had already been proliferating both on and off the platform, including a proposed attack on the U.S. Capitol and state capitol buildings on Jan. 17.
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 such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse are still active.
Trump later tweeted a statement from the @POTUS account before it appeared to be deleted. Later Friday, the same statement was shared by the Trump campaign’s Twitter account before that entire account was permanently.
“As we’ve said, using another account to try to evade a suspension is against our rules,” a Twitter spokesperson said in a statement.
Twitter said it would not suspend institutional accounts like @POTUS unless it had to in order to avoid real-world harm, but that it could limit those accounts’ capabilities. Those accounts will be transferred to the next administration.
In Trump’s statement, he accused Twitter employees of having “coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me. Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long.”
Trump was referring to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, the law that protects tech platforms from legal liability for their users’ posts and for moderating them. The Trump campaign account also shared an image of the usually blue Twitter logo in red with a yellow hammer and sickle, symbols associated with communism.
Suspending Trump’s account is 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 announce personnel changes before putting out 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 of Trump’s 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.
Trump and his conservative allies in Congress took aim at Twitter whenever the company moved to label or fact-check his posts. When Twitter began to fact-check Trump’s tweets for the first time last spring, Trump soon introduced an executive order taking aim at Section 230. Many viewed the order as retaliation for Twitter’s decision.
Twitter made special rules to exempt sitting world leaders from several of its policies, though it would still label or reduce distribution of messages that violated policies.
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