If Joe Biden is confirmed as President elect in the coming days and weeks, Donald Trump will not merely lose his hold on America’s highest office. The outgoing President would also lose special protections that have allowed him to tweet with relative immunity.
While in office, Mr Trump’s personal account has enjoyed a “public interest” exemption that allows his tweets to remain online even when they are considered to break Twitter’s rules.
But if he were to leave office on January 20, he would no longer be considered a government official, meaning he would be bound by the same rules as the vast majority of Twitter’s 187 million daily users.
This means Mr Trump, who has more than 88 million followers, could see tweets removed or his account banned if he consistently breaks rules on calling for violence, harassment or seeking to undermine elections.
During his presidency, tweets from Mr Trump that are deemed to break the company’s rules have been left online due to the public interest exemption. Since May, Twitter has hid tweets behind warning labels, prompting the President to accuse the company of censorship and demand that legal protections enjoyed by social media companies be reversed. The labels require users to click past them to see Mr Trump’s tweets and stop other users from retweeting them.
2020 Election
Twitter first applied the label to a tweet in May about protests in the US following George Floyd’s death in which Mr Trump declared: “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”, and applied another in October after he claimed to be "immune" to Covid-19 after recovering from the disease. This week more than a dozen of his tweets have been labelled for breaking rules on undermining the integrity of an election.
Twitter applies a “strikes” policy in which multiple violations can mean an account being frozen, suspended or permanently banned. On Wednesday, the account of Steve Bannon, Mr Trump’s former senior advisor, after he posted a video calling for the beheadings of government officials. Mr Bannon said he wanted to put the heads of FBI director Christopher Wray and the US pandemic chief Anthony Fauci “on pikes” on display at the White House “as a warning to federal bureaucrats”
We placed a warning on a Tweet from @realDonaldTrump for making a potentially misleading claim about an election. This action is in line with our Civic Integrity Policy. More here: https://t.co/k6OkjNXEAm
— Twitter Safety (@TwitterSafety) November 4, 2020
Twitter said it had removed the account for violating its policy on the glorification of violence.
YouTube removed the same video, and said it had given Mr Bannon’s account a strike for violating a similar policy.
Twitter’s policies on public interest exemptions have largely been crafted during Mr Trump’s presidency and have been seen largely as a response to his tweets, so him leaving office would represent uncharted territory.
Since Mr Trump was sworn in, the company has left up tweets including threatening North Korea, retweeting an anti-Muslim video posted by the British far-right figure Jayda Fransen and allegedly encouraging violence against the news network CNN, saying they are newsworthy or in the public interest.
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