◼ TECHNOLOGY Bloomberg Businessweek November 16, 202028
When President Trump leaves the White House
on Jan. 20, one thing he’ll have to hand over to
President-elect Joe Biden is his Twitter account.
Well, not that one. Trump will get to keep
@realDonaldTrump, but the @POTUS account,
which has 32.6 million followers, belongs to the
president, whoever that may be. And while Trump
has rarely used @POTUS for the diatribes and ram-
blings that have become synonymous with his pres-
idency, he has used it to retweet messages from
his personal account to tens of millions of people.
Trump’s loss of that additional megaphone is
just one way the end of his term will set off a period
of transition with his preferred online platform.
While both sides have something to lose, Trump
may be the one who will lose more.
The relationship between Trump and Twitter
has always been complicated. His constant use of
the social network has made it more politically
relevant than ever before, and many Americans
learned to turn to Twitter to keep track of what
Trump is thinking. (One exception was Republican
lawmakers, who so regularly denied reading his
tweets that reporters took to carrying around
printed-out versions of the president’s more con-
troversial posts when seeking comment.) While the
company’s mostly liberal employees are celebrat-
ing Biden’s victory, it’s become difficult to think of
the Trump presidency without also thinking of his
Twitter account and, conversely, to think of Twitter
without President Trump.
This hasn’t always made things easy for Twitter
Inc. Trump frequently violates the company’s
rules against election misinformation and has
crossed the line with other policies as well, such
as glorifying violence and sharing Covid-19 misin-
formation. But Twitter also treats world leaders dif-
ferently than regular users, and Trump has avoided
the actions the company would likely have taken
against him were he a private citizen. That special
treatment will soon go away.
Trump was, of course, on Twitter before tak-
ing office. But the atmosphere surrounding social
media content moderation was much different
when he was pushing the boundaries as a can-
didate in 2016. Twitter didn’t spend much time
discussing how to police his account before he
unexpectedly won the presidency.
It’s become a near constant conversation topic
among employees in the years since. Trump quickly
confirmed that the say-whatever-he-wants Twitter
style that served him well on the campaign trail
would carry over to the White House, taxing the
company’s lax guidelines. Trump posted some out-
rageous things that didn’t necessarily violate rules,including an edited video of himself body-slamming
the CNN logo and a post referring to North Korean
dictator Kim Jong Un as “short and fat.” Other
posts did seem to cross the line. In September 2017,
Trump called Kim “Little Rocket Man” and wrote
that North Korea “won’t be around much longer,”
a perceived threat that led many to call on the com-
pany to block the tweet for threatening and pro-
moting violence, which was against Twitter’s rules.
Twitter had a “newsworthiness” policy, which
meant tweets from important people weren’t
affected by the company’s rules in the same way
as other violators. But doing nothing to Trump’s
posts wasn’t a great solution either; it made Twitter
look like it didn’t have any rules at all. After serious
discussion at the top levels of the company, exec-
utives elected to leave the tweet up, according to
a person familiar with the discussions who wasn’t
authorized to speak publicly.
Eventually, Twitter created a solution: a warn-
ing label appended to tweets from world leaders
that violated the rules but were too important to
be removed. Twitter now hides such tweets behind
an “interstitial,” forcing users to click to read them,
and blocks users from liking and commenting on
the tweets. But it doesn’t take the tweets down,
which would be standard for most other users.
Tweets from former world leaders aren’t pro-
tected by this policy, which could result in Twitter
removing posts from Trump that would have just
been labeled if he were still president. World lead-
ers are also mostly immune from receiving “strikes”
against their accounts for patterns of violations.
Once he’s no longer in office, Trump’s patterns of
use could result in account freezes, suspensions, or
even a ban for @realDonaldTrump.
It’s unclear whether Twitter’s business will take
a hit without a president who’s turned the service
into a must-read for people following U.S. politi-
cal discourse. The company first acknowledged
that Trump may have been good for business on
an earnings call in April 2017, when then-Chief
Financial Officer Anthony Noto alluded to “some
evidence that we benefited from our new and res-
urrected users following more news and political
accounts in Q1, particularly in the U.S.” Twitter
added 6 million new daily users in that quarter, up
from just 3 million the quarter before.
But the evidence for a Twitter Trump bump is
mixed. After the initial quarterly boost, the com-
pany added just 1 million new users in two of the
next three quarters. The bulk of Twitter’s user
growth has come during the past two years of
Trump’s presidency and much of it since the onset
of the coronavirus pandemic.“Twitter
may see some
initial softness,
but I believe
they ’ve
outgrown
any Trump
dependency”@realDonaldTrump@YouTube@JoeBiden@CNN@Change@SpeakerPelosi@BernieSanders@BarackObama@nytimes@POTUS▼ Share of U.S. adults
with a public Twitter
account who’ve
mentioned the following
in an original tweet12%7 6 5 5 4 4 4 4 4