The social media company says its permanent suspension of the former president’s personal account means a federally preserved version will also be blocked from the platform.
Twitter will not allow the National Archives to make former President Donald Trump’s past tweets from his @realDonaldTrump account available on the social media platform, the company told POLITICO on Wednesday, in the latest display of Silicon Valley’s power over communications channels used by the U.S. government.
The statement came as the National Archives and Records Administration has been working to create an official online archive of Trump’s tweets as president, including those that prompted Twitter to permanently suspend him earlier this year as a threat to public safety. NARA already maintains archives for the institutional and personal accounts of many other former Trump administration officials, in which the old tweets live on the Twitter platform and users can retweet, like and otherwise interact with them.
Twitter’s decision is further fuel for a debate in Washington about social media companies’ control over users’ speech, amid Republican accusations that Silicon Valley’s giants are censoring conservatives. Just two days ago, Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas lamented in a 12-page opinion that technology has placed “control of so much speech in the hands of a few private parties,” suggesting Congress may need to step in.
NARA spokesperson James Pritchett said that while the National Archives “is still exploring the best way” to make the @realDonaldTrump archival content public, the agency would defer to Twitter on whether that archive should be available on the social media site and would still post the preserved tweets to the Donald J. Trump Presidential Library website.
Twitter spokesperson Trenton Kennedy also said the company’s teams “are working with NARA on the preservation of” @realDonaldTrump’s tweets, “as is standard with any administration transition.”
Twitter, though, is adamant that no version of @realDonaldTrump’s tweets reappear on its platform. The company permanently suspended Trump’s personal account in January, accusing him of repeatedly glorifying violence after a throng of his supporters staged a deadly rampage through the Capitol. It had previously slapped warning labels on a number of Trump’s tweets, including one last spring in which he warned that “when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”
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Twitter says its permanent suspension of Trump’s personal account means a federally preserved version will also be blocked from the platform https://t.co/l7QQpcrCci
— POLITICO (@politico) April 8, 2021
Donnie Boy has been canceled for sure.
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