Trump Will Never Be Blocked from Twitter, Here's Why
Twitter isn’t going to stop President Donald Trump from using the platform, no matter how many people want it to.
The social media platform has been on a rampage lately, removing the coveted verification badge and occasionally even deleting accounts of white supremacists, racists and neo-Nazi’s after a backlash from other users on the social media community. And some users have been calling for President Donald Trump to be blocked on the site as well, based on the idea that his routine harassment and online bullying is a breach of Twitter’s code of conduct.
“Donald Trump is a terrorist. Delete his account, @Twitter,” Comedian Alex Goldschmidt tweeted.
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“Ok, let’s break down all the opposition for banning Donald Trump from Twitter. One at a time. Thread coming,” another user tweeted, followed by a string of reasons to remove the President from the social media site.
And some have been more humorous. Even during the 2016 presidential election, Hillary Clinton tweeted “delete your account” to Trump.
But no matter how many users call for Twitter to remove Trump from the site, it just isn’t happening.
"Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets, would hide important information people should be able to see and debate," the company wrote in a blog post on Friday night. "It would also not silence that leader, but it would certainly hamper necessary discussion around their words and actions.”
The post didn’t say which “world leader,” in particular the post was aimed at, but Trump has been at the center of Twitter controversy since he took office. The President has broken Twitters rules time and time again, by sending out abusive tweets, threatening tweets (including some to the leader of North Korea, fueling fear of a nuclear war), and retweeting anti Semitic memes.
“We review Tweets by leaders within the political context that defines them, and enforce our rules accordingly,” Twitter’s post read. “No one person's account drives Twitter’s growth, or influences these decisions. We work hard to remain unbiased with the public interest in mind.”
Moreover, while the First Amendment doesn’t apply to private corporations like Twitter, censoring Trump online could prove wildly problematic. Both former White House press secretary Sean Spicer and the Department of Justice have said that Trump’s tweets are are considered official statements from the president, which likely made the decision on whether or not to block him even more difficult for Twitter.
President Trump's Twitter account @realDonaldTrump did go offline for 11 whole minutes in early November after a rogue departing employee deleted it on his last day—but that might be the closest Twitter ever gets to removing him.