The day has finally come -- Donald Trump's twitter account @realDonaldTrump has been permanently suspended. Trump has been breaking Twitter's rules for years but they have been reluctant to fully kick him off their social network as not to unvoice the President of the United States, until now.
Many have been calling for Trump to leave or be kicked off of Twitter for years, Hilary Clinton prominently among them. And wouldn't you know, she just retweeted her 2016 suggestion for Trump to 'Delete your account' with a simple, large grey checkmark.
But this move by Twitter was no knee-jerk reaction; they gave Donald several chances to abide by the rules.
Twitter made moves recently to censor some of Trump's more outrageous claims, especially about the 2020 election results and Trump's false accusations of wide spread voter fraud orchestrated by the Democrats.
First Twitter added disclaimers to his tweets in an attempt to fact check the lies the President of the United States was telling to his millions of followers. Twitter then had to outright remove some of Trump's most recent tweets for their potential to incite violence.
And now after a blatantly pro-Trump mob of thousands stormed the Capitol building at Trump's behest, leaving 5 dead and dozens arrested, Twitter had no choice but to pull the plug entirely, following Trump's final two ridiculous tweets that sealed his suspension fate.
On January 8th, 2021, just 12 days before Biden's inauguration and the ousting of Trump as President, Donald tweeted:
“The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
And shortly after he tweeted:
“To all of those who have asked, I will not be going to the Inauguration on January 20th.”
Just twelve days left until Donald Trump was no longer our President and he couldn't help himself but to incite even more violence via his social media presence. Twitter had no choice but to suspend his account, for the legitimate concern of what else the man would say before he leaves office, willfully or no.
Twitter did release a statement about the suspension which is worth reading in full. One of the main takeaways was their assessment:
We assessed the two Tweets referenced above under our Glorification of Violence policy, which aims to prevent the glorification of violence that could inspire others to replicate violent acts and determined that they were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021.