Twitter blocked several of Donald Trump’s posts from being shared on Wednesday. The action is the most aggressive yet from Twitter and it comes after it joined Facebook and YouTube in removing a video post from Trump’s account in which the president praised the protestors.Įarlier on Wednesday, Twitter blocked several of Trump’s posts from being shared, citing a “risk of violence”.Īs his supporters gathered on Wednesday to protest the certification of the 3 November election results, Trump in a tweet accused Vice-president Mike Pence of lacking “the courage to do what should have been done”. If Trump again violates the policies, his account will be permanently suspended from Twitter.Ī statement from Trump promising an “orderly transition” following Congress certifying Biden’s win was posted to Twitter by deputy chief of staff for communications Dan Scavino. If he does not delete them, his account will remain suspended indefinitely, the company said in a public statement. Twitter locked Trump out of his account for 12 hours and is requiring him to delete three tweets the company says violates its policies. Instagram, which is owned by Facebook, also locked Trump’s account. So while levels of harmful speech might return to an equilibrium after an initial spike, this does not undo the harm experienced by the recipients of the toxic and threatening speech, as well as others who were exposed to it.Both companies locked Trump’s accounts and removed several posts from the president that cast doubt on the election results and praised his supporters, who forcibly took to the government building as lawmakers attempted to tally votes for the election.įacebook has suspended Trump from posting to his account for 24 hours. Second, research suggests that women and people of color who are public figures are especially likely to be targeted by harmful speech. Given the scale of the platform, this can amount to thousands if not millions of unflagged harmful tweets targeting an individual or group. (To be sure, there are important examples in which individuals or groups remain the targets of harmful speech over extended time periods.) And while Twitter estimates that 51% of tweets that violate the platform’s terms of service are automatically caught by its machine learning systems, this leaves 49% to be detected by human content moderators. First, this pattern creates a whack-a-mole dynamic in which harmful speech targeting a figure may appear in bursts, only to recede. The bursty pattern presents difficulties for content moderation policies and enforcement.
Taken together, this analysis provides a birds-eye view of how Trump’s recent tweets impact the larger online discourse around the political figures he attacked.
TWITTER DONALD TRUMP SERIES
Perspective defines severe toxicity as “very hateful, aggressive, disrespectful” speech, and threats as describing “an intention to inflict pain, injury, or violence against an individual or group.” Third, we construct an interrupted time series with a 24-hour moving average, which enables us to isolate the impact of Trump’s tweet on the levels of severe toxicity and threats. We do so by using Perspective, an open source API created by Jigsaw and Google’s Counter Abuse Technology team to enable the classification of harmful speech online. Ralph Northam, for example, a tweet had to include “Governor of Virginia,” “Governor of VA,” “Northam,” or “Ralph Northam.” Next, we estimate the levels of two characteristics in that corpus: severe toxicity and threats. To be included in the corpus for Virginia Gov. For each politician, we used the politician’s name, Twitter handle, and title. (Everyday, the NYU Center for Social Media and Politics collects a 10% random sample of Twitter, which amounts to tens of millions of daily tweets.) First, we use keywords to identify the corpus of tweets associated with each of the three politicians Trump mentioned. For each of the three politicians mentioned in Trump’s tweets, we complete a three-step analysis on a random sample of tweets.
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