SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – Days after social media giant Twitter banned President Donald Trump from his platform following a violent takeover of the U.S. Capitol, San Francisco police were preparing a rally for his followers Monday afternoon on Company Street. his.
While there has been no official word on a mass demonstration, there has been traffic on social media urging supporters of the president to gather at the Twitter headquarters.
Fortunately, the thousands of Twitter employees who would normally work on Mondays have not been in the building since March 2020, when they were told to work remotely due to the COVID-19 outbreak.
In a statement to the San Francisco Chronicle Sunday night, a company spokesman said Twitter respects “people’s right to express their opinion.”
“While we respect the right of people to express their views, we have been transparent about the factors that led to our decision last week,” the spokesman said in an email. “We have nothing to add, but we wanted to confirm that we continue to have mandatory guidance from home for Twitter employees.”
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San Francisco police also told the newspaper that they had plans in place, including calling a mutual assistant from nearby law enforcement agencies, if necessary.
Twitter announced Friday afternoon that it had permanently suspended Trump’s account for concern that his tweets could incite violence.
In a statement The company released the suspension, saying Twitter officials had reviewed Trump’s tweets last week and determined they were violating the site’s policies.
The suspension comes just days after Trump supporters took the U.S. Capitol by force, killing five people and evacuating Congress from the building when the legislature planned to certify the victory of Joe Biden’s 2020 presidential election.
Image of Trump’s suspended Twitter account (CBS SF)
“In the context of this week’s horrific events, we made it clear on Wednesday that additional breaches of Twitter rules could result in this same line of action,” Twitter wrote at the time. “Our public interest framework exists to allow the public to listen directly to elected officials and world leaders. It is based on a principle that people have a right to be held accountable to power in the open.”
“However, we made it clear that for years these accounts are not above our rules and cannot use Twitter to incite violence, among other things.”
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The statement includes Twitter documentation of Trump tweets that violated the website’s “glorification of violence” standards.
One of Trump’s tweets that violated this standard said:
“The 75,000,000 great American patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and BACK TO AMERICA, will have a giant voice in the future. They will not be respected or treated unfairly in any way, form or form !!! “
Twitter also suspended the accounts of former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell for sharing posts on the conspiracy theories network known as QAnon.
The social media giant had suspended the president’s account for twelve hours on Wednesday. The platform made some of its posts “unavailable” after its supporters crossed Capitol Hill and then temporarily blocked the president’s account.
Twitter was not the only one to take action against the president. Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and Youtube have also suspended Trump accounts and Amazon, Apple and Google have ripped pro-Trump Parler off their platforms.
Amazon will remove Parler, the conservative-favored alternative social networking platform, from its cloud hosting service, Amazon Web Services, on Sunday evening, which will effectively launch it on the public Internet after pressure from the public and Amazon employees. .