Twitter permanently suspends Donald Trump's account

 Twitter permanently suspends Donald Trump's account

The president of the United States, Donald Trump, lost his favorite speaker on Friday. Twitter has announced that it is permanently suspending his personal account, @realDonaldTrump, at the risk that he will continue to incite violence after his followers forcibly stormed the Capitol on Wednesday. A few hours after the action of the social network, the official government account charged against the company assuring that it no longer allowed "freedom of expression." The tweets were deleted minutes later. Twitter shares are down 3% since the announcement.

“The unprecedented action of Twitter is not about freedom of expression. They are only going to promote a platform for the radical left where some of the most aggressive people in the world can speak freely. Stay tuned, ”the Trump Administration account published at night. The social network removed that post. According to Reuters, Trump will try to form his own platform after Twitter's suspension, citing the risk of further incitement to violence after originating at the US Capitol.

Jack Dorsey's company has informed the decision to suspend the account of the outgoing president through a statement shared through his Twitter Safety profile. "After a close review of recent tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context surrounding them, we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement to violence," the company said.

The social network had already suspended the president's account for 12 hours after the incidents that occurred at the headquarters of the legislature in Washington when hundreds of protesters invaded the building to prevent the congressional session from taking place. Twitter accused the president of instigating the incidents.

Trump's personal account, now closed, became his great communication tool during his tenure. In it, he announced some of his most important decisions, including the dismissal of members of his government as a head of the Pentagon or an attorney general, insulted his political rivals and denounced without evidence the alleged fraud in the elections of the last november. With a direct and unfiltered style, the president of the United States had become a singular star of Twitter. When he announced his bid for the presidency in 2015, Trump had 2.98 million followers. The number rose to 13 million when he won the election in November 2016. This Friday, before it was closed, 88 million followed.

ADDED BY COVID-19, the social network toughened its rules to stop misinformation. He first tagged some of his posts as misleading. And on the 6th, he deleted several of them and temporarily suspended the account.

The measure taken this Friday goes beyond the one adopted 24 hours earlier by Facebook, which maintains its profile suspended at least until the political transition in the US is completed, presumably until January 20 when Joe Biden is sworn in as the new president.

What about the official account of the president?

Trump began his presidency on January 20, 2017, ending some customs of the previous term in the management of networks. The first was to refuse to use only the official account that Twitter had created for the president of the United States, @POTUS (for the acronym in English of President Of The United States), as his official communication channel and to continue tweeting, to your way, from your personal account.

The @POTUS account was created precisely to avoid what Trump has represented in this mandate: to make invisible the line that separates the personal and the professional, between the citizen and the official position that he holds. The account had been created with the arrival of former President Barack Obama, Trump's predecessor, to power in 2009.

As of January 20, Twitter has announced that the @POTUS account will be handed over to the team of next President Joe Biden and the fan count will start with zero. As it did with Obama, the social network will create another account, @ POTUS45 (in reference to the number of the Republican presidency), in which will be all the publications made during Trump's term that will become part of the National Archives Administration and Documents (NARA). However, the tweets on Trump's personal account are not protected and since they have been deleted they cannot be consulted. For now, it is up to Twitter whether the information on the @realDonaldTrump account, which received preferential treatment from the company because it is an account of a world leader of general interest, can be consulted by the rest of the users of the platform.