Twitter on Wednesday locked the account of President Donald Trump, which prevents him from posting messages to his more than 88 million followers, after a day of violence in the nation’s capital and a string of inaccurate and inflammatory posts from the president.
The move was an unprecedented rebuke of Trump by Twitter, which has long been a preferred megaphone for the president. Twitter said Trump’s account would remain locked for 12 hours and the ban could be extended if Trump did not agree to delete several tweets that rejected the election results and appeared to incite violence. The company also said it would permanently suspend Trump’s account if he continued to violate its policies against violent threats and election misinformation.
Twitter’s action followed a torrent of criticism aimed at social media companies for their role in spreading misinformation and being a bullhorn for Trump as a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol building on Wednesday and halted the certification of Electoral College votes.
On Twitter, users had called for the company’s chief executive, Jack Dorsey, to take down Trump’s account. Civil rights groups weighed in, saying action by social media companies against calls for political violence was “long overdue.” And even venture capitalists who had reaped riches from investing in social media urged Twitter and Facebook to do more.
“For four years you’ve rationalized this terror. Inciting violent treason is not a free speech exercise,” Chris Sacca, a tech investor who had invested in Twitter, wrote to Dorsey and Facebook’s chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg. “If you work at those companies, it’s on you too. Shut it down.”
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Twitter, Facebook and others had long resisted cracking down on Trump’s posts and other toxic content. While the platforms had started taking more steps against political misinformation in the months before the election, they declined to remove Trump’s posts and instead took half steps, such as labelling his posts.
So when violence broke out in Washington on Wednesday, it was, in the minds of longtime critics, the day the chickens came home to roost for the social media companies. After the onslaught of questions began, Twitter and Facebook started proactively removing several of Trump’s posts from their sites, including one where the president falsely said that “a sacred landslide election victory” had been “unceremoniously & viciously stripped away.”