On Tuesday, President Trump took to Twitter to threaten North Korea with nuclear war, stating that he has a “bigger and more powerful nuclear button” than Kim Jong Un. Ten years ago, this scenario would have sounded like something from a dystopian novel, but now it’s just our reality. This isn’t the first time Trump has used Twitter to threaten North Korea. In September, he tweeted that if the thoughts of the Foreign Minister of North Korea are similar to those of “Little Rocket Man”, then North Korea “won’t be around much longer.”
Obviously, it’s really freaking scary that our president is increasing tensions between our country and North Korea on such a public platform. Some Twitter users have taken these concerns to Twitter support by reporting Trump’s tweet for “inciting violence by threatening harm to others.” This makes sense, doesn’t it? If Twitter can suspend Rose McGowan for telling Ben Affleck to “fuck off,” then why hasn’t it suspended Trump for literally threatening nuclear war?
North Korean Leader Kim Jong Un just stated that the “Nuclear Button is on his desk at all times.” Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform him that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 3, 2018
However, when one individual said told Her Campus she reported Trump’s tweet, she got an automated response saying, “We have reviewed your report carefully and found that there was no violation of the Twitter Rules against abusive behavior.” It said to remember that “some Tweets may seem to be abusive when viewed in isolation, but may not be when viewed in the context of a larger conversation. While we accept reports of violations from anyone, sometimes we also need to hear directly from the target to ensure that we have proper context.”
Valid, but it seems to me that when you view Trump’s tweet in the context of the current political climate, it gets worse, not better.
Before trying to understand Twitter’s reasoning, let’s first look at their terms of service. Twitter states that you “may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious physical harm, death, or disease of an individual or group of people.” It also states that “you may not make specific threats of violence or wish for the serious harm, death or disease of an individual or group of people. This includes, but is not limited to, threatening or promoting terrorism.” That sounds exactly what Trump is doing, doesn’t it?
While there is a no-tolerance policy for violent threats, “glorifying violence” is allowed under circumstances like “acts of war, military attacks, and state-sanctioned executions”. (Of course, if Trump were to “press his nuclear button” to attack North Korea, it wouldn’t technically be an act of war unless he had the approval of Congress, but that’s a different conversation for a different time.) Basically, Twitter’s official rules are vague enough that we can sort of see how it can get away with not suspending Trump.
However, according to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey, there is another clause that influences Twitter’s decision not to suspend Trump: “If an account were to publicly attack or harass a private citizen, we would take action. We do have a clause in our terms of service that we unfortunately did not have publicly stated…around newsworthiness and public interest.”
THREAD: Some of you have been asking why we haven’t taken down the Tweet mentioned here: https://t.co/CecwG0qHmq 1/6
— Twitter Public Policy (@Policy) September 25, 2017
Basically, because Trump’s threatening tweets are deemed “newsworthy,” they were left up to become a public record of the news. If “newsworthy” sounds like subjective criterium to you, though, you’re not alone. Even Dorsey stated, “This is a subjective evaluation by us,” he said. “And we work very hard to make sure we are listening to voices, specifically the journalists on our platform to determine newsworthiness…. In some cases we’re going to get it wrong.”
Terms of service aside, Twitter has one major reason not to suspend Trump that Dorsey didn’t mention: According to Fortune, Twitter would lose as much as $2 billion in market value if Trump stopped tweeting.