Former President Donald Trump’s bid to reclaim his Twitter account was quickly thwarted, as, according to Twitter, he has been “permanently suspended… due to the risk of further incitement of violence.”
The excommunicated serial poster was also indefinitely banned from Facebook by the Oversight Board as well this week.
On Tuesday evening, Trump debuted his latest blog, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump.”
Other people organically reposting Trump’s blogs was fine, according to a Twitter spokeswoman, as long as the content didn’t break any web guidelines.
There are several accounts on Twitter now who are taking advantage of this loophole and posting his blog comments as their content, and numerous Facebook pages and groups are posting as well.
However, the site remains committed to preventing Trump — or whoever is running the blog’s account on his behalf — from tweeting.
On Thursday morning, a Twitter accounts with the handle “@DJTDesk” appeared on Twitter. The account’s bio section stated that the handle would be exclusively for “Posts copied from Save America on behalf of the 45th POTUS; Originally composed via DonaldJTrump/Desk.”
Within hours, the account was suspended.
“As stated in our ban evasion policy, we’ll take enforcement action on accounts whose apparent intent is to replace or promote content affiliated with a suspended account,” a Twitter spokesperson told NBC senior reporter Brandy Zadrozny, who first posted about the banning.
Trump is almost likely to try again in some way, if he tries to craft tweets that suspiciously fit into the Twitter character limit or seeks a different medium, but for the time being, we can all admire the relative quiet.
Following news that Facebook will maintain its ban on Donald Trump’s account, the former president issued a statement blasting tech companies for what he sees as a concerted assault on free expression.
“What Facebook, Twitter, and Google have done is a total disgrace and an embarrassment to our Country,” Trump’s statement read. “Free Speech has been taken away from the President of the United States because the Radical Left Lunatics are afraid of the truth, but the truth will come out anyway, bigger and stronger than ever before.”
“The People of our Country will not stand for it!” Trump continued. “These corrupt social media companies must pay a political price, and must never again be allowed to destroy and decimate our electoral process.”
Most big websites forbid people from posting to alternate pages in order to get around their suspensions. These laws forced Twitter and Facebook to take action earlier this year against tweets that they said attempted to circumvent Trump’s January bans, including those from his campaign and his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump.
Sharing content from Trump’s new website, “From the Desk of Donald J. Trump,” is typically “permitted as long as the information does not otherwise break the Twitter Rules,” according to a Twitter spokesperson.
However, if users want to emulate Trump’s account because their only purpose is to overwrite a suspended account, the spokesperson stated, posting content from the platform would violate Twitter’s laws against ban evasions.
On Jan. 8, 2021, Twitter suspended Trump’s original campaign account for sending tweets that were similar to those sent by Trump’s personal account.
It also took down a number of comments from the White House’s official account that were similar to Trump’s.
Several rulings have come down in the last 24 hours regarding Trump. Not only did Facebook and Twitter stop him from posting, in a historic bipartisan decision, the Federal Election Commission has asked Congress to prohibit a campaign donation practice allegedly used by former President Donald Trump’s team last year.
“It’s important that donors be able to exercise their choices freely,” Democratic FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub told the Times. “If their money is being taken from them because of some reverse checkoff option they didn’t notice, then they are not giving their money freely. It’s almost like theft. I don’t want to see donors tricked.”
In 2020, Trump’s campaign “deployed prechecked boxes to enroll any donor in weekly withdrawals — unless they unchecked the package.”
The Trump campaign has allegedly pre-checked an extra box that doubled a donor’s donation unless it was unchecked, resulting in a $122 million payout to backers.
Democrats, including the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, have used this strategy as well.
The FEC said in its recommendation that “many contributors are unaware of the ‘pre-checked’ boxes and are surprised by the already completed transactions appearing on account statements.”
All is not lost in Trump’s future, as the FEC did impart a ruling in favor of the former president.
The FEC has concluded its investigation into whether former President Donald Trump secretly paid women hush money before the 2016 election.
Since struggling to find that Trump or his campaign “knowingly and willfully” broke campaign finance law when his former counsel Michael Cohen paid $130,000 to porn star Stormy Daniels, the FEC voted 4-1 to close the investigation.
In 2018, Cohen was found guilty of lying to Congress, tax fraud, and other allegations in connection with the payments to Daniels and other women. He was imprisoned for three years.
The panel has two Republican commissioners, Allen Dickerson and Sean Cooksey, and they wrote in a statement that they felt Cohen had been punished criminally and the matter was “not the best use of agency resources.”
“The public record is complete with respect to the conduct at issue in these complaints, and Mr. Cohen has been punished by the government of the United States for the conduct at issue in these matters,” Dickerson and Cooksey wrote.
At this time, there is no statement about the Twitter ban from Trump or his team.
