Donald Trump’s Twitter account will stop receiving special treatment if he loses the presidential election, the social media giant has confirmed.
Bloomberg has reported a confirmation from Twitter that Trump will fall into the category of “former world leader” if he loses the presidency, and therefore will not be subject to the same protections his account gets currently.
Unlike other Twitter users, Trump and other world leaders are able to post content that violates the company’s rules around offensive or misleading content.
While ordinary users would see their tweets forcibly deleted, or even their accounts suspended on a temporary permanent basis, leaders like Trump are allowed to keep their content up – although they can be marked with warnings.
Trump has brazenly lied in two speeches since election night, sharing baseless conspiracy theories about electoral fraud and alleging wrongdoing at polling stations in key states.
Some major US television networks cut him off mid-speech on Thursday evening to correct misinformation, and Twitter has marked a number of his tweets with a warning that reads: “Some or all of the content shared in this Tweet is disputed and might be misleading about an election or other civic process.”
Tweets with a content warning can’t be liked or retweeted without comment, in a bid to stop engagements with the post from spreading it further between social media users.
Referred to by Twitter as public interest interstitials, the warnings are intended to allow the post to remain on the public record.
They were announced in June 2019, but weren’t used on Trump until May 2020 when he posted “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” during the racial justice protests in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd.
The Bloomberg report explains that Twitter’s approach to Trump’s tweets is based in their platform-wide policy, which insists users should be able to read tweets from world leaders – even when they’re controversial – “because their messages are inherently newsworthy”.
This same approach doesn’t apply to former leaders, who are treated like ordinary people once they leave office.
If Trump were to lose the election it means from January 21 – the day after what could be Joe Biden’s inauguration – his account would be subject to the same rules as everyone else.
Posts that include hate speech, certain misinformation such as false public health information, or glorification of violence could be removed. Multiple violations could see his account suspended, or even permanently deleted.
One of Trump’s closest former advisers Steve Bannon was removed permanently from Twitter on Friday after suggesting on a podcast episode that he’d like to see America’s top medical adviser Dr Anthony Fauci beheaded.
During an episode of his podcast War Room: Pandemic, Bannon discussed the imagined beheadings of Fauci and FBI director Christopher Wray, saying he would like to put their “heads on pikes” outside the White House as a “warning”.
Twitter has also removed the accounts of a number of high-profile UK-based accounts during 2020 after they were found to violate the platform’s rules.
Katie Hopkins was banned in June for violating the site’s hateful conduct policy, while musician Wiley was banned in July after making a string of anti-Semitic posts.