Top conservatives on Twitter claim they are hemorrhaging followers due to a double whammy of sorts: the exodus of users angry that President Trump has been deplatformed and what appears to be a simultaneous system-wide purge by the social media giant.
The president, the platform announced Friday evening, had been permanently suspended because it had determined that two of his tweets from earlier in the day violated its glorification of violence policy, ruling that they could be viewed as an incitement of violence.
Recommended Stories
Trump, seemingly without a way to communicate to his more than 88 million followers, put out a statement condemning the platform’s decision and accusing it of censorship via his @POTUS Twitter account. The message was deleted shortly thereafter because “using another account to try to evade a suspension is against our rules,” a Twitter spokesperson told the Washington Examiner.
“As I have been saying for a long time, Twitter has gone further and further in banning free speech, and tonight, Twitter employees have coordinated with the Democrats and the Radical Left in removing my account from their platform, to silence me — and YOU, the 75,000,000 great patriots who voted for me,” the president said. “Twitter may be a private company, but without the government’s gift of Section 230 they would not exist for long.”
“I predicted this would happen. We have been negotiating with various other sites, and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at the possibilities of building out our own platform in the near future. We will not be SILENCED!” Trump added. “Twitter is not about FREE SPEECH. They are all about promoting a Radical Left platform where some of the most vicious people in the world are allowed to speak freely. STAY TUNED!”
One senior administration official said the president was “ballistic” after the ban and that he was “scrambling to figure out what his options are,” according to Politico.
The president’s campaign then shared the same message from the president, only to get its own account suspended. The Trump campaign’s digital director, Gary Coby, was also suspended from Twitter after he changed his name to the president’s and his profile icon to the photo Trump had as his.
Twitter regularly locks accounts due to rules on spam and platform manipulation, a Twitter spokesperson previously told the Washington Examiner in a statement.
“As part of our work to protect the integrity of the conversation on Twitter, we regularly challenge accounts to confirm account details such as email and phone number,” the statement read. “Until the accounts confirm additional account information, they are in a locked state and do not count towards follower counts.”
The Trump team was not the only one to be purged from the platform on Friday.
Two Trump allies, Sidney Powell (a former federal attorney who has gained infamy since November’s election with her repeated, unsubstantiated lawsuits alleging voter fraud behind President-elect Joe Biden’s victory) and retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn (Trump’s first national security adviser, whom he pardoned for crimes he pleaded guilty to, and then tried to reverse, in connection to the Mueller investigation), had their Twitter accounts disabled permanently after the company cracked down on QAnon propaganda.
As a result of the purge, many conservative pundits claimed that the number of followers dropped by the thousands, with some claiming that the move was politically motivated. Alternatively, some conservatives, such as Rush Limbaugh and Mark Levin, signed off of the platform for good in solidarity with the president.
Trump and conservatives at large have long ridiculed the social media platform for what they describe as an anti-conservative bias, with some equating it to censorship. The president and his allies have looked to get Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which protects social media companies from being liable, removed. Trump has repeatedly called for the protections to be stripped, and he vetoed the National Defense Authorization Act in December because it did not include a provision to accomplish this task. The Senate voted to override Trump’s veto.
