Twitter Confirms Plans to Ban Trump from Platform
Social media giant planning to crack down on president when he leaves office.
Social media giant Twitter has confirmed it is working on plans to crack down on President Donald Trump when he leaves office, with possible actions including banning him from the platform.
Jack Dorsey’s company revealed they will seek to crack down harder on Trump’s personal Twitter account after he leaves office.
When the president eventually becomes a private citizen, he will lose the protections that Twitter offers to world leaders.
The change will expose Trump to the possibility of being more strictly moderated by the platform and possibly even banned if he continues to disseminate “conspiracy theories,” according to The Independent.
Twitter states in its “principles & approach” to world leaders that, “if a Tweet from a world leader does violate the Twitter Rules but there is a clear public interest value to keeping the Tweet on the service, we may place it behind a notice that provides context about the violation and allows people to click through should they wish to see the content.”
On condition of anonymity, a Twitter spokesperson told Forbes last Thursday that, if Joe Biden is inaugurated as president, Trump will lose that stipulation at noon on January 20.
The anonymous spokesperson also said the company does not have “special rules” for dealing with Trump.
Despite Trump’s status as the president of the United States, Twitter has been cracking down on many of his tweets since Election Day.
The majority of the post being targeted have questioned the integrity of the election results.
Twitter has been either hiding them or flagging them and linking to articles that assert the election results are trustworthy.
In the two days following the election, Twitter labeled 50 percent of Trump’s tweets, according to Forbes.
As The Daily Wire reported:
A glance at the Twitter page of Donald Trump two days after the election presents a truly remarkable sight: the sitting president of the United States, as an historically tight Electoral College vote is still being tallied, is being repeatedly censored by one of the world’s most powerful platforms.
To the applause of many on the Left, Twitter slapped its first fact-check label over a Trump tweet in May.
The platform rationalized the move by pointing to its newly announced “misleading information” policy, rolled out amid the COVID lockdowns.
The new policy blocks out initial posts, replacing them with “labels and warning messages to provide additional explanations or clarifications” on tweets that might present some “risk” of “harm” to the public.
Only after clicking on the censoring label can a user read the tweet containing the supposedly “misleading” or “disputed” or “unverified” claim.
Twitter intends to give Democratic nominee Joe Biden the president’s official U.S. government Twitter account on Jan. 20, 2021, regardless of whether President Donald Trump concedes, as The Daily Wire noted.
Trump has recently been stressing the need for a repeal of Section 230 of the 1996 Communications Decency Act, which protects social media companies such as Twitter from being treated as publishers.
In early December, the president revealed that he will veto the National Defense Authorization Act unless Congress repeals Section 230.
A growing number of people are calling for Twitter and Facebook to lose their Section 230 protections due to their manipulation of the content that users are able to see.
Critics say that Section 230 unfairly shields social media platforms from liability over items posted on their platforms.
Opponents of Section 230 have been vocal that tech behemoths like Twitter and Facebook should no longer be shielded as a neutral platform when they operate more like a publisher by censoring and removing content.
Without such protections from the US Government, Big Tech companies would need to dramatically alter their practices, or face being sued into oblivion.
https://neonnettle.com/news/13599-twitter-confirms-plans-to-ban-trump-from-platform By: Jay Greenberg – December 16. 2020
Comment: This would come as no great surprise, if they did block President Trump. The little dictators at Big Tech have basically done what every they want from stalking, to promoting child porn, to deleting CM’s accounts that have not violated the ToS; yet they don’t like them. Twitter will be an Echo Chamber for the Left – no loss
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