Who is the nation’s No. 1 purveyor of hate, threats, abuse and harassment? It is Donald Trump, and the twitterverse is rife with examples of how he has used and abused his Twitter account to spread lies and threaten his enemies.
Yet Twitter continues to
make excuses for failing to enforce its own rules despite the president’s refusal to restrain his abuses. It’s time for Twitter to draw the line.
Even Attorney General William Barr has joined the chorus of Twitter critics. In an ABC News interview on Feb. 13, Barr suggested he was being “bullied” on Twitter by Trump and said the president’s tweets “make it impossible for me to do my job.” Twitter’s rules explicitly state: “You may not engage in the targeted harassment of someone, or incite other people to do so.”
Trump has abused his account by tweeting in support of hate groups. He has spread lies and retweeted material clearly designed to distort the truth. Twitter has been aware for years that Trump was in blatant violation of company policies.
While the company bans others, Trump gets a special exception simply because he’s the president.
Yet his account is not the official White House account and is, instead, one he established in 2009. The White House Twitter account contains loads of political entries but is largely empty of the threatening, bullying, abusive language that peppers Trump’s personal account.
In January 2018, a year after Trump took office, Twitter issued a statement that didn’t specifically mention him but sought to rationalize the special exception: “Blocking a world leader from Twitter or removing their controversial Tweets would hide important information people should be able to see and debate.”
At the time, Trump had only just started testing the boundaries of Twitter decorum. But as his legal troubles mounted — over emoluments, a payoff to a porn star, Russian meddling and the Ukraine scandal — and former staffers left office in droves, Trump increasingly saw Twitter as the fastest way to harass his critics.
In the past year, he has used Twitter to distort the course of justice and intimidate witnesses. This month he attacked a federal judge, Amy Berman Jackson, as she weighed the prison sentence of Roger Stone, a top Trump crony.
He tweeted a lie that Jackson sentenced Trump’s former campaign manager, Paul Manafort, to “solitary confinement.”
He retweeted a video manipulated to suggest that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was slurring her words.
Trump uses his Twitter account for political campaign promotion — something an official government account cannot legally do.
Which is why Twitter needs to rethink its rationale for giving Trump a pass on breaking the rules.
The person using that account might currently occupy the presidency, but this is his personal account.
By Twitter’s own rules, @realdonaldtrump deserves to get an unceremonious boot.
— St. Louis Post-Dispatch
