Date: 2025-01-10 Page is: DBtxt003.php txt00020090
Social Media
The enabling ecosystem
These are the platforms that have banned Trump and his allies ... How 6 major social media sites addressed violations of their content policies
Peter Burgess
These are the platforms that have banned Trump and his allies How 6 major social media sites addressed violations of their content policies Supporters of President Trump assemble on the east side of the U.S. Capitol last week. The president's role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol did not sit well with some of the social media platforms he uses. Supporters of President Trump assemble on the east side of the U.S. Capitol last week. The president's role in encouraging the attack on the Capitol did not sit well with some of the social media platforms he uses. (Michael Robinson Chavez/The Washington Post) Add to list The biggest names in tech have taken aggressive steps against the inflammatory rhetoric of President Trump that culminated last week with a mob of his supporters storming the U.S. Capitol while Congress was attempting to certify the election of Joe Biden as the nation’s 46th president. The moves are meant to guard against further efforts to incite violence and come after months of Trump’s relentless and unfounded allegations of voter fraud and his refusal to accept his loss in the 2020 election. The platforms have been met with cries of censorship from Trump’s allies and reluctant applause from others who see the efforts as long overdue. Here’s how the platforms cracked down on Trump and his allies: Twitter Twitter started slapping a label on Trump’s claims that he won the 2020 election in November: “This claim about election fraud is disputed.” The platform didn’t attempt to limit his 88 million followers from viewing or sharing such postings, as it had in June for Trump’s tweets labeling the people demonstrating after the killing of George Floyd as “THUGS.” Twitter purged more than 70,000 accounts affiliated with QAnon following Capitol riot Fast-forward to Wednesday: The platform locked Trump out of his account for 12 hours following the Capitol assault and said it wouldn’t return access until he deleted three tweets that Twitter said violated its content policy. Then, on Friday, following two more incendiary tweets from Trump, Twitter announced a permanent ban on his account. The platform also later suspended @POTUS, the official account for the presidency, and his @TeamTrump campaign account after Trump attempted to try to skirt the ban. Two Twitter accounts belonging to pro-Trump lawyer Lin Wood were permanently suspended Thursday over tweets that the platform said incited violence. One of the accounts, @FightBackLaw, was apparently being used to dodge the ban. AD A Saturday tweet by Rudolph W. Giuliani linking to his appearance on the Stephen K. Bannon podcast “War Room” and claiming that YouTube was censoring him was slapped with this label on Twitter: “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, retweeted or liked due to a risk of violence.” Trump’s personal attorney had falsely claimed on the podcast that the Capitol rioters were “trained anarchists” attempting to frame Trump. Twitter said that the tweet violated its civic integrity policy. Twitter permanently banned Bannon, a former White House chief strategist, following the November election after he suggested in a video that Anthony S. Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, and FBI Director Christopher A. Wray should be beheaded. Donald Trump Jr. was subjected to a 12-hour ban until he removed a tweet in July, which included a video clip purporting the conspiratorial effects of the anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine against the novel coronavirus. Twitter said this violated its covid-19 misinformation policy. His account remains active. Longtime Trump ally Roger Stone was permanently banned in 2017 after mocking prominent journalists and media personalities, which Twitter said violated its abusive behavior rules. “We apply our rules impartially for all people on our service, regardless of background or political affiliation,” a Twitter spokeswoman said in an email. “We’re constantly learning and improving in our efforts to serve the public conversation, and we’ll continue to be transparent with the public in this work.” Gab, the social network that has welcomed Qanon and extremist figures, explained Facebook and Instagram Facebook and its photo-sharing service, Instagram, suspended Trump for 24 hours starting Wednesday after he posted a video telling the mob that breached the Capitol to go home while also saying “we love you, you’re very special.” The next day, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced that Trump would be banned indefinitely but at least through the presidential transition. The suspension came after Twitter’s 12-hour ban but marked the most aggressive action taken against the president by a social platform. “The shocking events of the last 24 hours clearly demonstrate that President Donald Trump intends to use his remaining time in office to undermine the peaceful and lawful transition of power to his elected successor, Joe Biden,” Zuckerberg wrote in a post. “We believe the risks of allowing the President to continue to use our service during this period are simply too great.” Parler sues Amazon after pro-Trump site goes dark In July, the platform removed more than 100 pages and accounts on Facebook and Instagram affiliated with Stone for using fake accounts to spread misinformation, the company said at the time. Facebook and Instagram representatives did not immediately respond to a request for comment. YouTube Google-owned YouTube said in a thread tweeted by YouTube Insider on Thursday that it would issue strikes to any channels posting videos with false claims — including about widespread voter fraud — that violate the platform’s policies. The company said it has removed thousands of videos in the past month, including several posted by Trump, that “spread misinformation claiming widespread voter fraud changed the result of the 2020 election.” Channels with one strike are temporarily suspended from posting or live-streaming; three strikes within three months will warrant permanent removal. YouTube said in a statement that Trump’s channel hasn’t received three strikes, as of Monday. The platform had removed the Bannon video regarding Fauci and Wray — his first strike — and suspended his channel for one week. Then, YouTube permanently banned Bannon’s channel “War Room” after he published videos that YouTube said violated its election misinformation policy, including the Giuliani appearance. In an open letter released Thursday, the Alphabet Workers Union condemned the Capitol riot and said that YouTube and other social platforms have a responsibility to face the “growing fascist movement in the US.” The group, which includes full-time and temporary employees at Google and other Alphabet companies in the U.S. and Canada, said it had warned YouTube executives about the danger of not removing content with hate, harassment, discrimination from the platform. “We warned our executives about this danger, only to be ignored or given token concessions, and the results have been suicides, mass murders, violence around the world, and now an attempted coup at the Capitol of the United States,” the letter said. “Once again, YouTube’s response yesterday was lackluster, demonstrating a continued policy of selective and insufficient enforcement of its guidelines against the use of the platform to spread hatred and extremism.” Snapchat The Snap-owned platform indefinitely suspended Trump’s account on Wednesday, citing concern over the possible spread of hate speech and threats of violence, a Snap spokeswoman said. The action comes after a decision in June to stop promoting Trump’s Snapchat account on the Discover page of the app. AD “This does not mean that we will remove content that people disagree with, or accounts that are insensitive to some people,” CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a June memo. “But there is simply no room for debate in our country about the value of human life and the importance of a constant struggle for freedom, equality, and justice.” Reddit In June, Reddit banned r/The_Donald and a slew of other pro-Trump pages that were prone to violent threats and misinformation for violating the platform’s policy. Following Wednesday’s violence, the platform also banned subreddit r/DonaldTrump, a hub for “Stop the Steal” conspiracy theorists that encouraged users to go to the U.S. Capitol. “Reddit’s site-wide policies [reddithelp.com] prohibit content that promotes hate, or encourages, glorifies, incites, or calls for violence against groups of people or individuals,” the platform said in an emailed statement. “In accordance with this, we have been proactively reaching out to moderators to remind them of our policies and to offer support or resources as needed. We have also taken action to ban the community r/donaldtrump given repeated policy violations in recent days regarding the violence at the U.S. Capitol.” Twitch Amazon-owned video service Twitch disabled Trump’s channel indefinitely on Thursday in response to the Capitol riot. “Given the current extraordinary circumstances and the President’s incendiary rhetoric, we believe this is a necessary step to protect our community and prevent Twitch from being used to incite further violence,” the company said in an emailed statement. Updated January 11, 2021 Complete coverage: Pro-Trump mob storms Capitol building Six hours of paralysis: Inside Trump’s failure to act after a mob stormed the Capitol The latest: State capitals face threat of armed protests, FBI warns | Chad Wolf resigns as homeland security secretary Analysis: What Trump said before his supporters stormed the Capitol, annotated Inside the Capitol siege: How barricaded lawmakers and aides sounded urgent pleas for help as police lost control Ashli Babbitt: Her rocky path from Obama backer to devoted follower of Trump and QAnon | Video shows the fatal shooting Timeline: How one of America’s ugliest days unraveled inside and outside the Capitol