Twitter announced late Friday that it had permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s account.
The company made the announcement just days after supporters of Trump stormed the U.S. Capitol after the president riled them up at a rally nearby. Amid the chaos that unfolded at the building, Twitter was facing pressure to suspend the president’s accounts.
“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,” the company’s @TwitterSafety account wrote on Friday evening.
The company also detailed its decision in a blog post. Earlier this week, Twitter suspended Trump’s accounts for 12 hours after his deletion of several tweets that violated its civic integrity policy.
In the blog post, Twitter examined the two tweets Trump had sent out on Friday regarding his supporters—who he said “will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”—and that he would not be attending President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration.
“Due to the ongoing tensions in the United States, and an uptick in the global conversation in regards to the people who violently stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, these two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks,” the company wrote in the blog post.
The company added that those tweets “were highly likely to encourage and inspire people to replicate the criminal acts that took place at the U.S. Capitol.”
