The long-awaited and long-overdue day when Donald Trump is kicked off of Twitter came on Friday evening, but the president’s addiction to the site would not let him go quietly into that tweetless night.
Following Twitter’s suspension of the @realdonaldtrump profile for its role in inciting the violent insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on January 6th (not to mention countless other incidents of white supremacist violence since the president took office and gained a wider platform for his tweets, but I digress), Trump hopped on the official @POTUS account—which he has mostly eschewed in favor of his personal profile during his tenure in office—to complain about the ban.
“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,” Trump tweeted.
“We have been negotiating with various other sites and will have a big announcement soon, while we also look at building out our own platform in the future,” he continued. “We will not be SILENCED!”
Unfortunately for Trump, as a private company Twitter has the full right and capability to silence him on their platform—which is exactly what they did. After he not so cleverly tried to evade his suspension by tweeting from the official presidential account, Twitter deleted those messages too.
“As stated in our ban evasion policy, if it is clear that another account is being used for the purposes of evading a ban, it is also subject to suspension,” a spokesperson told The Hill. “For government accounts, such as @POTUS and @WhiteHouse, we will not suspend those accounts but will take action to limit their use.”
It appears Trump also tried to get his tweet fix through other accounts connected to his campaign, including @TeamTrump and his digital director’s Twitter page—both of which were also quickly suspended. Earlier in the week, Facebook booted the president from their site as well.
Trump is going out sad and so, as expected, the conservative tears are many in response. Megyn Kelly, Ben Carson, Nikki Haley, and Lindsey Graham (who has his own troubles to be concerned about) have all come out to complain about the devastating precedent of Twitter, a private company, blocking a profligate liar and fire starter from starting more fires on their website.
They can get over it, or they can head over to Parler–the preferred platform for extremists who want to push violence in peace. Except Parler may not be long for the mainstream online world either. Axios reports that Google pulled the app from its Play store on Friday because it continues to host posts about inciting further violence in D.C., and Apple has issued a similar threat to the app for imminent removal if it doesn’t clean up its act.
I’m gonna go out on a limb and say these extremists and their enablers in elected office aren’t going to stop their IRL violence, but I’m enjoying watching them flail and whine about not having the right to plot freely online too.