Permabanned —Twitter is taking a hard-line stance on the banned @realDonaldTrump account.
The National Archives and Records Administration is a federal agency responsible for preserving historically significant federal records, including tweets from senior government officials. For example, former Trump White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders turned over control of her official Twitter account to NARA when she left office. Leaving tweets on Twitter makes them easily accessible by the public.
But Politico reports that Twitter won’t allow anything like this to happen with former President Donald Trump’s now-banned @realDonaldTrump account.
“Given that we permanently suspended @realDonaldTrump, the content from the account will not appear on Twitter as it did previously or as archived administration accounts do currently, regardless of how NARA decides to display the data it has preserved,” a Twitter spokesman told Politico. “Administration accounts that are archived on the service are accounts that were not in violation of the Twitter Rules.”
Twitter permanently banned Donald Trump from its platform two days after the January 6 attack on the US Capitol. Twitter concluded that his tweets on that day had promoted or glorified violence.
Since then, Trump has had to get by without his most powerful megaphone. He no longer has the ability to blast his thoughts directly onto the screens of millions of people every day.
It’s not clear if NARA was seeking to have Twitter reinstate the @realDonaldTrump account under NARA control or create a copy of the account under another name. Perhaps NARA was proposing to post copies of Trump’s tweets to a completely new Twitter account. At this point it doesn’t matter because Twitter has ruled out having Trump’s tweets on its platform in any form.
Instead, NARA says it will post an archive of Trump’s tweet to the website of the Trump Presidential Library, which itself is under NARA’s control. NARA says that the archive will include all of Trump’s tweets, including controversial tweets that got warning labels from Twitter, as well as the tweets that ultimately got Trump banned.
NARA spokesman James Pritchett told Politico that the agency is “working to make the exported content available… as a download.” That sounds like NARA may only offer the tweets as one large download as opposed to making each tweet available online individually—a much less convenient format than bringing the tweets back to Twitter.
It’s not clear how much this matters in practice. There is already at least one private website hosting copies of Trump’s tweets. But there’s no guarantee that independent sites like this will still be around a decade from now, whereas Twitter and NARA (or a successor agency), in all likelihood, will still be here.
I would have expected social media sites like Twitter to care more about not having Trump as an active user than about eradicating every trace of his old writings from their platforms. But Twitter apparently feels strongly about both Trump and his tweets.
And Facebook evidently feels the same way. Last week, the company deleted an interview between Trump and his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, warning that any content posted “in the voice of Donald Trump” wasn’t welcome.
By Timothy B. Lee