Hallelujah! Trump could soon be booted off of Twitter as well as out of the White House.
At a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee on Tuesday, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey said that the policy exceptions allowing Trump to incite violence, proliferate racism, and promote white supremacy on his platform will end as soon Trump’s presidency does.
(The dawning of that glorious morn, when the inauguration of the newly elected president Joe Biden will take place, is just 63 days away. But who’s counting?)
Though the kind of content that Trump consistently posts ostensibly violates the social platform’s rules, Dorsey has maintained that Twitter has some sort of duty to help Trump broadcast all of his deranged, untrue, and dangerous thoughts into the public sphere because he is the president.
That ridiculousness is set to end after January 20, reports the New York Times.
From the Times:
At Tuesday’s hearing, Jack Dorsey, Twitter’s chief executive, said the company would no longer make policy exceptions for Mr. Trump after he leaves office in January. During Mr. Trump’s time as a world leader, Twitter allowed him to post content that violated its rules, though it began adding labels to some of the tweets starting in May to indicate that the posts were disputed or glorified violence.
“If an account suddenly is not a world leader anymore, that particular policy goes away,” Mr. Dorsey said.
There’s no question that Trump will still be addicted to pushing the same trash he’s gotten away with posting even after he’s no longer president—but hopefully, Dorsey is being honest in saying that Twitter will no longer tolerate it.
But surprising no one, Mark Zuckerberg—chief enabler of all that is wrong with social media—would not commit at the hearing to changing how Facebook moderates Trump’s posts, even after he leaves office.
Democrats on the committee also took Zuckerberg to task for not banning Steve Bannon’s account, after the former Trump campaign strategist live-streamed himself earlier this month saying that Dr. Anthony Fauci should be beheaded. Zuckerberg said Facebook’s policies do not require Bannon to be banned for those outrageous comments but his account was given a “strike,” according to the Times.
Meanwhile, Republican senators like Ted Cruz (R-Texas) used the hearing to push the clearly baseless theory that posts by conservatives are being overly moderated on Facebook and Twitter.