Twitter has permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account “due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” the social media platform announced on Friday (Jan. 8).
The move comes two days after a crowd of Trump-supporting rioters violently clashed with law enforcement, storming the U.S. Capitol and sending the building into lockdown. At the time, Twitter and Facebook imposed temporary freezes on the president’s account.
Prior to the decision to permanently suspend his account, Trump tweeted that he will not be attending President-elect Joe Biden’s Jan. 20 inauguration. In another, he wrote, “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!!!”
A number of celebrities have been calling out social media platforms for their inability to control the spread of misinformation and violent rhetoric on their platforms in recent months — which has allowed for both the President himself and his supporters to spread baseless claims of election fraud.
After the chaos in Washington D.C., Selena Gomez specifically called out Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Google as entities, plus YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, and CEO of Alphabet Inc. and Google Sundar Pichai.
“You have all failed the American people today, and I hope you’re going to fix things moving forward,” she wrote.
Borat creator Sacha Baron Cohen has been similarly vocal, slamming Dorsey for not banning Trump sooner. “5 people are dead because of Trump’s election lies–lies you helped spread!” he wrote.
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