Trump’s deplatforming accelerates as Twitter finally bans him and several of his associates

Don­ald Trump’s tweet­ing days are over. Finally.

This after­noon, Twit­ter announced it’s per­ma­nent­ly banned him from the ser­vice after con­clud­ing that his most recent tweets vio­late its pol­i­cy against glo­ri­fy­ing vio­lence. Trump howled back through the @POTUS account, but Twit­ter, show­ing it means busi­ness, delet­ed all of those tweets. Twit­ter like­wise took down the TeamTrump account after it tried to repost mes­sages from Trump.

The ban is against Trump as a per­son and not mere­ly his @realDonaldTrump account, the com­pa­ny con­firmed, which was Trump’s prin­ci­pal mega­phone, estab­lished long before he became a pres­i­den­tial candidate.

Trump is pro­hib­it­ed from return­ing to Twit­ter using anoth­er han­dle or an alias.

“In the con­text of hor­rif­ic events this week, we made it clear on Wednes­day that addi­tion­al vio­la­tions of the Twit­ter Rules would poten­tial­ly result in this very course of action,” the com­pa­ny said in a state­ment announc­ing its action.

“Our pub­lic inter­est frame­work [world lead­ers pol­i­cy] exists to enable the pub­lic to hear from elect­ed offi­cials and world lead­ers direct­ly. It is built on a prin­ci­ple that the peo­ple have a right to hold pow­er to account in the open. How­ev­er, we made it clear going back years that these accounts are not above our rules entire­ly and can­not use Twit­ter to incite vio­lence, among oth­er things.”

Twit­ter also banned Don­ald Trump’s asso­ciates Michael Fly­nn and Sid­ney Pow­ell as well as Ron Watkins, who is thought by some to be behind the dis­turb­ing and dis­gust­ing “QAnon” con­spir­a­cy movement.

Trump was “indef­i­nite­ly” sus­pend­ed from Face­book and Insta­gram ear­li­er this week, with Mark Zucker­berg say­ing that the sus­pen­sion would last at least through Jan­u­ary 20th. Ama­zon-owned Twitch has also sus­pend­ed Trump.

These actions are long, long overdue.

“For months — years, real­ly — peo­ple have asked what it would take for Face­book and Twit­ter to ban the pol­i­cy-vio­la­tor-in-chief from their plat­forms. Hate speech, dox­ing, and dan­ger­ous dis­in­for­ma­tion on Covid evi­dent­ly weren’t enough,” observed Wired’s Steven Levy. “Oh, they put (easy-to-ignore) warn­ing labels on some tweets and posts, and even took the stray one down. But exil­ing him from the plat­forms? No. He is the pres­i­dent, after all.”

“That changed this week, when Don­ald Trump dis­patched a cos­play mob of thugs and toy sol­diers to take the Capi­tol — and they actu­al­ly did.”

“While he gave the actu­al march­ing orders in per­son, the invaders who came to Wash­ing­ton were fed by Trump’s avalanche of false claims and incite­ments on social media, hard­ly mit­i­gat­ed by warn­ing labels or notices that oth­er, per­haps more reli­able sources were report­ing some­thing else.”

As Levy argues, the Trump bans won’t fix the ills that are plagu­ing social net­works like Face­book and Twit­ter, even if they will make it hard­er for Trump to incite vio­lence and spread mis­in­for­ma­tion or disinformation.

Don­ald Trump’s cam­paign YouTube chan­nel remains up as of press time, but it has not released any new videos recently.

Mean­while, Par­ler — the any­thing-goes social net­work that has become a haven for Trump fans and right wing extrem­ists — has been warned by Google and Apple to start polic­ing its plat­form and mod­er­ate con­tent. Google has already sus­pend­ed Par­ler from Google Play and Apple has threat­ened to remove Par­ler from the App Store if the com­pa­ny does­n’t respond to its demands with­in twen­ty-four hours.

Trump fans are furi­ous that Trump has been banned, as is to be expect­ed, with some false­ly assert­ing that it is uncon­sti­tu­tion­al or a vio­la­tion of the First Amend­ment for Twit­ter to ban Trump. They are incorrect.

The First Amend­ment con­strains the gov­ern­ment from restrict­ing free speech, not pri­vate­ly owned social net­works. Twit­ter is a cor­po­ra­tion that oper­ates a mas­sive online bul­letin board. For bet­ter or worse, Twit­ter and oth­er social net­works are allowed under our free enter­prise sys­tem to large­ly decide what their busi­ness prac­tices will be, and they have decid­ed Don­ald Trump is bad for business.

They have every right to give him the boot, and they have.