Twitter: Trump Not Immune From Being Banned

Not even Donald Trump is immune from being banned under Twitter’s terms of service, company heads told Politico.

Twitter usually offers a bit of wiggle room when it comes to “vitriolic” tweets from world leaders if they can be considered newsworthy, but that “is not a blanket exception for the president or anyone else,” Twitter legal and policy chief Vijaya Gadde said in an interview alongside CEO Jack Dorsey.

President Donald Trump has used his Twitter account almost daily since taking office, bypassing what he calls “the enemy of the American people” press to directly vent to the public. Sometimes he tends to stir up major controversy such as the tweet sent out last year stating if North Korean leaders continued with their rhetoric at the time, “they won’t be around much longer!”

When asked if he would weigh in personally to remove Trump from the platform in case he crossed the line, Twitter CEO Dorsey declined to get into specifics.

“We have to balance it with the context that it’s in,” he told Politico. “So my role is to ask questions and make sure we’re being impartial, and we’re upholding consistently our terms of service, including public interest.”

Alongside Facebook’s Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, Dorsey is set to testifying in front of the Senate Intelligence committee on Wednesday. It is expected that censorship and other corporate policies will be addressed.

The Twitter CEO will also testify solo in a hearing from the House Energy and Commerce Committee entitled “Twitter: Transparency and Accountability.”

Major tech platforms such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have come under severe scrutiny from legislators over how the companies decide to censor content.

According to Dorsey, Twitter never is intentionally biased against anyone political affiliation or group and can’t seem to understand why conservative figures think the social network does.

“I don’t know why they are repeating it, but for our part, we can do a better job of explaining our principles,” he said, even in the wake of the suspension of Alex Jones and multiple libertarian and right-leaning commentators. “And anytime we recognize mistakes, we’ve been fairly vocal about it, and then correcting. So that’s what we’re going to focus on.”

The Senate Intel Committee’s hearing with Dorsey and Sandberg will begin at 9:30AM ET, while the House Energy and Commerce’s own is scheduled for 1:30PM ET on Wednesday.