Donald Trump hasn’t let up on targeting the news media he dislikes as “fake” and he has incited violence among his base. If he tweeted an explicit call for murder, would Twitter consider deleting Trump?
“We’d definitely … You know … we’d certainly talk about it,” Twitter co-founder and CEO Jack Dorsey said in a recent HuffPost interview.
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HuffPost Senior Reporter Ashley Feinberg said she wasn’t expecting a response when she sent Dorsey a message in October to see if he’d be willing to sit down for an interview.
“My previous DMs to him looked like this,” Feinberg said.
But Dorsey agreed. In the interview, Feinberg asked him about harassment on Twitter.
Rampant, site-wide harassment has plagued the platform for years, but the most the CEO of Twitter was able to tell Feinberg about specific steps being taken to solve the problem “is that they’re looking into maybe making the report button a little bigger, eventually,” she said.
When politicians are promoting misinformation, “We take action,” Dorsey said, dodging the question.
But he seemed to draw the line with Trump.”We believe it’s important that the world sees how global leaders think and how they act. And we think the conversation that ensues around that is critical.”
Then Feinberg asked: If Trump tweeted out asking each of his followers to murder one journalist, would you remove him?
“That would be a violent threat. We’d definitely … You know we’re in constant communication with all governments around the world. So we’d certainly talk about it,” Dosey said.
Feinberg pessed on. What about if Tump issued a murderous directive?
Dorsey waffled.
“I’m not going to talk about particulars. We’ve established protocol, it’s transparent. It’s out there for everyone to read,” he said. “We have, independent of the US president, we have conversations with all governments. It’s not just limited to this one.”
Twitter users have bombarded Dorsey with messages and tweets encouraging him to delete Trump’s profile, Daily Mail reported.
The president has 57.2 million followers on Twitter. He’s accused of violating the site’s policies, which prohibit violent threats, with inflammatory tweets implying that the U.S. might nuke North Korea.
“So if @realdonaldtrump specifically tweeted that each follower should kill one journalist, you’d ‘talk about’ removing him? How does that possibly align with this commitment you’ve outlined?” one asked.
In September 2017, Trump tweeted: “Just heard Foreign Minister of North Korea speak at U.N. If he echoes thoughts of Little Rocket Man, they won’t be around much longer!”
Two days later, Twitter’s policy team said they decided to leave Trump’s
Dorsey and Trump have a lot in common, Monique Judge wrote for The Root.
“Like maybe Jack Dorsey really is just Donald Trump in disguise,” Judge wrote. “Hear me out on this … Both Dorsey and Trump seem to subscribe to the ‘gotta hear both sides’ manner of dealing with racists, Nazis and white nationalists. Rather than call it what it is, they can come up with 100 excuses as to why what the racists are doing is not exactly bad per se, it just looks that way.
“No, there is nothing Donald Trump could do to get kicked off Twitter,” Judge wrote.
