Twitter has suspended @realDonaldTrump from its platform, naming it “the risk of further incitement of violence.”
Seeing it as a risk of more violence, Twitter has permanently suspended Former President Donald Trump’s account @realDonaldTrump.
The action comes two days after pro-Trump supporters pushed past barricades and forcibly made their way into the US Capitol Building to disturb the counting of Electoral College Votes.
Trump has been disputing the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to challenger Joe Biden, and he asserted that the election was “stolen.” In Wednesday’s Congressional session, he said to his supporters at a rally:
“We will stop the steal. We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue, and we’re going to the Capitol…We’re going to try and give our Republicans, the weak ones…the kind of pride and boldness that they need to take back our country.”
Protestors immediately proceeded with the next step – and some of them – actually entered the Capitol, with some vandalizing the building and stealing items from the offices. Five people were reported dead because of this attack, including a protestor from a gunshot wound and a US Capitol police officer.
In the last two days, well-known politicians from both sides of the aisle have been publicly mulling impeaching the president or conjuring the 25th Amendment to remove him from office.
Twitter didn’t have that power, but as a large social media platform popular with the president, it can mute Trump at will.
Jack Dorsey, its CEO and a strong proponent of Bitcoin started the “Blue Sky Initiative” within the company as a way of making a decentralized standard for social media platforms.
“Blockchain and Bitcoin point to a future, point to a world where content exists forever—where it’s permanent, where it doesn’t go away, where it exists forever on every single node that’s connected to it,” he said at the Oslo Freedom Forum last year.
Donald Trump’s Twitter account ain’t gonna last forever.
There are two tweets sent recently that Twitter holds on as evidence of incitement to violence, according to a blog post that explains the move.
The first was this sent from Trump:
“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. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape, or form!!!”
The second:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
In Twitter’s point of view, these must be taken into context given that further armed protests are being planned on Twitter and other social media sites for January 17.
For instance, Twitter writes, “The second Tweet may also serve as an encouragement to those potentially considering violent acts that the Inauguration would be a ‘safe’ target, as he will not be attending.”
Facebook and Twitter both came under investigation for allowing President Trump to spread misinformation, though Twitter has flagged many tweets from the president since the November election in a way to limit their spread.
This move isn’t strictly about centralized against decentralized platforms, which happens on a continuum than as binary positions. Dlive, a decentralized video-streaming platform owned by cryptocurrency platform Tron, has also been criticized for allowing rioters in DC to profit from videos they shared from the Capitol. The platform has responded by appealing to its terms of services – and suspending or deleting accounts.
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