Twitter Inc Being Asked To Scrap Trump’s Account: Should It Do It?

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Twitter user and President-elect Donald Trump’s tweet that claimed millions of people voted illegally for rival Hillary Clinton is encouraging calls for the micro-blogging to delete his account. Trump alleged in his tweet, without any evidence, that he “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

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Should Trump quit Twitter?

Throughout the presidential election, people have been asking Twitter to pull down Trump’s account, but many of the concerns centered around hate speech. Some people blamed social media platforms after Trump’s victory for not doing enough to halt the spread of misleading news. But when Trump took to Twitter to criticize The New York Times, the result of the presidential election and the cast of Hamilton, some voters thought that the President-elect might be better off without Twitter, according to Silicon Beat.

In a recent national poll, researchers at Quinnipiac University discovered that about 59% of voters want Trump to delete his Twitter account. However, the tweets by Trump are making headlines, and this is good for Twitter, which has been struggling to attract more users.

According to The Wall Street Journal, even Facebook grappled internally with what to do with Trump’s social media posts during his campaign. During the election, the phrase “delete your account” was Clinton’s most popular tweet to Trump.

Twitter questioned about its policy

As concerns about fake news on social media platforms are increasing after the U.S. election, some of Clinton’s former aides and supporters, including former campaign spokesman Jesse Ferguson, have argued that the President-elect’s tweet ran afoul of Twitter’s rules about online conduct.

The micro-blogging firm takes into account if a user is creating misleading or false content repeatedly, which constitutes spam. According to its policy, accounts engaged in that kind of behavior may be permanently suspended or temporarily locked.

Twitter did not say anything on Monday about how it is managing these concerns. In an email to Silicon Beat, Nu Wexler, a spokesman for the company, said the rules apply to all accounts, but he did not say whether the tweet posted by Trump went against the company’s policy or not. In addition, Wexler did not clarify if the social network was considering deleting the President-elect’s account or if he received any violation notices.

“We do not comment on individual accounts, for privacy and security reasons,” Wexler said.

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