Twitter Bans Donald Trump Permanently

Twitter is going to be a lot more peaceful henceforth. The President of the United States has officially been banned from the social media platform, 12 days before the next President takes office.

On Wednesday night (Jan. 6) President Trump was temporarily suspended from Twitter following the siege he incited at the United States Capitol building. After temporarily locking Trump’s account for 12 hours after the mob riot, C.E.O. Jack Dorsey was confronted with demands that the tech company ban Trump permanently. Dorsey said he would not follow through with more stringent measures, but then things changed after Trump jumped back on Twitter Friday morning with two tweets. The first confirmed that he would not be attending the Jan. 20 inauguration of President-elect Joe Biden and the other thanking his supporters once again.

Twitter’s official “Safety” account tweeted on Friday afternoon, “After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”  

Vice President-elect Kamala Harris was among the first lawmakers to call on Twitter to ban Trump’s account. In October 2019, Harris brought it up during the fourth Democratic primary debate, but got push back from the other candidates and plenty of liberal pundits, who called the request “small ball.”

Responding to the criticism, she told CNN at the time, “It’s a serious matter. And it is a matter of the safety of those individuals. You can look at the fact that the shooter in El Paso was influenced by the words that the President of the United States, unfiltered, uses through this medium on Twitter. He has 65 million followers. And we have to take seriously the implications that are about the threatening witnesses, intimidating witnesses and obstructing justice.”

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Turns out, Harris’ foresight was spot on. President Trump is being largely criticized for using Twitter to incite violence for weeks by complaining that the 2020 presidential election was rigged. He even tweeted an invite to the January 6 protest, promising his followers that it “will be wild.”

Trump’s legal team lost nearly 60 court cases by failing to provide any evidence of massive voter fraud that would overturn the election in his favor. After a day of violence at the U.S. Capitol, where five people lost their lives, Congress certified Joe Biden’s win just after 3:40 a.m. on Jan. 7 making him the clear winner and the next President of the United States.

Shortly after Twitter issued the permanent ban on Trump’s account, “Thank You Twitter” began trending.