Over the past seven days, President Trump has made two public statements about the validity of mail in ballots. Twitter immediately censored these tweets, punctuating a long-fought battle between the administration and the highly trafficked social media platform.
In a statement, Twitter noted that it “placed a public interest notice on this Tweet” for violating its civil integrity policy. The president has been cited by Twitter before, with a handful of tweets being blocked for being misleading, glorifying violence, and manipulating video of former Vice President Joe Biden, among others. These citations often are public interest notices affixed to original tweets to ensure that information in the public interest is shielded, but not deleted from the platform.
Some of the president’s tweets, however, have disappeared as Twitter blocks and removes accounts that are not in line with it’s policies and procedures.
One would be deleted by Breaking911 surrounding alleged audio leak of sexual assault allegation discussions between Michael Cohen and Chris Cuomo of CNN. The other belongs to a now deleted twitter account that the president retweeted twice.
That account @AlmostAction housed a substantial amount of Pro-Trump commentary. Some of which President Trump retweeted in the moments before the account was suspended. Tweets from the account spanned from depictions of the protests around the country to criticism of media and claims of murder and inaction to protect. In some of it’s more serious forms, the account posted intentionally misleading statements, including a claim that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. spoke on the current Black Lives Matter movement. The movement itself is less than a decade old.
Accounts with incendiary content and genuine conservative bent are not uncommon. But now, President Trump is amplifying these accounts. As content generated by politician’s social media accounts increasingly enters the public record, the public itself is left with a question. Should these tweets be disappearing at all, if the president’s personal social media account is a public forum?
Ivy Lyons 