Twitter wonders if Trump could be banned after leaving office

Once President-elect Joe Biden takes office on inauguration day, Twitter could revoke President Trump’s special privileges as a high-level world leader and treat his account like a normal account.

Twitter confirmed reports that a change in the account’s status could result in tougher enforcement action – although a spokesperson said the policy was not new.

The platform has a public interest exemption for the accounts of world leaders, whose words are generally newsworthy and important for their citizens to read, even if they break the rules.

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But the exemption does not apply to former world leaders, a spokesperson said.

Trump’s personal Twitter account has more than 88 million subscribers, and his last five tweets early Friday night each received more than 50,000 likes, the highest of which totaled almost 140,000.

But his tweets about unsubstantiated allegations of voter fraud garnered warning tags from Twitter stating, “This allegation regarding voter fraud is disputed.”

However, even these posts receive tens of thousands of likes and retweets. Twitter also took action against the president’s individual tweets ahead of the election, but refrained from punishing his account.

Warning labels could be replaced with stricter censorship on the platform. It is Twitter policy to ban accounts that promote violent extremism, share the personal information of others in order to harass them (also known as doxing), or engage in abusive behavior or manage fake accounts, among other violations.

A possible crackdown on Trump would not be a first for Twitter. The company blocked the New York Post in October after refusing to delete a tweet referring to a story of controversial emails allegedly found on Hunter Biden’s laptop. The post ban was subsequently lifted.

An employee exiting in 2017 also briefly disabled Trump’s personal account on his last day of work. It was restored 11 minutes later.

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That same year, the company temporarily suspended actress Rose McGowan’s account. She was speaking out against disgraced movie mogul and convicted rapist Harvey Weinstein. She included an image showing a private phone number in a tweet.

The president’s personal account, however, is separate from the @POTUS handle, which will be passed to Biden once he takes office.

Before Trump, it was used by former President Obama. After Trump’s inauguration, Obama’s presidential tweets were archived and forwarded to a new username, “@ POTUS44”.

Twitter spokesman Nick Pacilio said official Trump administration handles would go through a similar archiving process before being passed on to the incoming administration.