It’s over for Trump on Twitter: the US president’s account has been banned from the social medium for good. Quite a moment, because Twitter was not just another social medium for Trump. Among other things, he used his account to criticize, test policy, fire people and threaten.
The president used Twitter for more than ten years. With nearly 90 million followers, he fell just outside the top 5 most popular accounts. “Twitter was his most important mouthpiece,” said America connoisseur Markha Valenta. “Twitter has played a vital role for Trump in bypassing the existing media and directly addressing his supporters. It was through this social medium that his followers developed a personal relationship with him that would normally not have been possible.”
He was also able to launch test balloons and policy positions on the medium. “When he got a lot of reactions, he knew he had something good.” He then developed a campaign around it in the ‘real world’, says the America expert.
Covfefe
Over the past decade, Trump has sent more than 57,000 tweets, an average of about 15 a day. The tweet that got the most jokes was the one from 2017 that made #covfefe trending. The president probably wanted the floor press coverage typing, but in no time social media was full of jokes: “Did Trump fall asleep while tweeting?”
Also, after a few hours, all domain names with ‘covfefe’ in them were already sold out and someone bought a number plate with the word on it.
The tweet in October announcing that Trump and his wife Melania had tested positive for corona is his most liked and shared tweet. The president disappeared from Twitter for 14 hours due to his contamination, fueling speculation that he was not doing well. In the end, after that Twitter silence, he made it clear that there was no cloud in the air, saying he “felt better than he did 20 years ago.”
Much concern was raised about a tweet in May from Trump about disturbances in Minneapolis over the death of the black American George Floyd.
Trump said in that tweet “when the looting starts, the shooting starts”. He used the same words as Walter Headley, a Miami police chief in 1967, who was repeatedly discredited for his behavior against the black community. That tweet and Twitter and Facebook’s decision not to delete the message were widely criticized. Twitter did hide the tweet, by the way.
Other topics also went viral. Such as a photoshopped photo and a real photoshopped photo of Trump (on the body of film character Rocky Balboa), a dismissal and the wall between Mexico and the US.
Trump also expressed doubts about many things, such as that his predecessor Barack Obama was born in the US. “This was one of Trump’s first political test balloons on Twitter. When he got a lot of response to this, he decided to insist that Obama was not legitimate as president,” said Valenta. “That is how he really became politically visible.”
Trump has since acknowledged that Obama was born in the US.
And a situation that nearly escalated in 2017, following comments from the North Korean Secretary of State about missiles that could reach the mainland US. Trump responded with a tweet in which he called leader Kim Jong-un ‘little rocket man’ and threatened North Korea.
Trump was banned for 12 hours last Wednesday for failing to distance himself enough from the violent mob storming into Congress in his tweets. After that, Trump continued to tweet. Among other things, he wrote that he would not go to Biden’s inauguration and praised his supporters. That was the last straw for Twitter: the company decided to ban Trump because of “the risk of further incitement to violence.”
Trump also uses @POTUS, the official account of the president. But there is a small chance that he will ever be able to tweet via that account, says NOS tech editor Joost Schellevis.
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In the 2016 presidential election, untruths could circulate with little or no problem. That had to change, according to Twitter itself.
Partly due to tweets from Trump, there was an increasingly widespread call to Twitter to delete incorrect tweets or to provide a warning.
“In the 2016 presidential election, untruths could circulate with almost no problems,” says Schellevis. “That had to change, according to Twitter itself.” Many of Trump’s tweets were warned, for example because they were misleading about the outcome of the election.
To Parler?
Trump will find another way to communicate his views to the outside world anyway. He will first look for a different social medium, Valenta expects. A Twitter alternative is Parler, which is especially popular among right-wing users and is also under pressure. “But if that doesn’t work, I’m not surprised if he sets up his own media channel. As long as he can get his own message out.”
Or he creates a new, secret account. Twitterers already have enough ideas:
He can still log into Melania’s account, others suggest: