Published 18:57 IST, June 10th 2020
Twitter account copies Trump's tweets to see if it gets banned, check what happened next
In a bid to understand microblogging website Twitter’s policies of blocking posts, a curious internet user behaved exactly like the US President Donald Trump.
In a bid to understand microblogging website Twitter’s policies of blocking posts, a curious internet user behaved exactly like the US President Donald Trump. Calling it a “Twitter experiment”, the account with username @SuspendThePres has been tweeting everything that the 45th US President posts on Twitter since May 30 to find out what happens when a regular user posts same content as Trump who has been at odds with Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey.
Trump is known to be a regular and a prominent user of the microblogging website and at many instances chose the platform for huge announcements including firing officials to signing momentous deals with other countries. The account ‘will they suspend me?’ was created in February 2015 but the experiment was started in May-end to decipher if the account that posts ‘offensive’ tweet matters or the policy for Twitter remains the same irrespective of the fact that an individual is influential or not.
What was the outcome?
According to a written interview with a German media outlet, the individual behind the ‘experiment’ account who chooses to be anonymous revealed that one of his tweets was blocked for the first time in less than three days. The user has also claimed that he or she did not wish to prove anything instead, ‘it was about seeing what would happen’. Similar to Trump, @SuspendThePres tweeted about Black Lives Matter protests in which according to the US Presidents “thugs” were dishonouring the memory of George Floyd, the African American who died in police custody.
The post had also said, “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.". However, the tweet only resulted in Trump getting a warning about the glorification of violence, the account Will They Suspend Me? Was blocked for the same post. According to reports, Twitter has argued that the tweet by US President was believed to be in the public interest and therefore it was allowed on his profile. On the other hand, @SuspendThePres had to delete the post to get the account reactivated after 12 hours.
What are the insights?
In the same interview with the German media outlet, the individual behind the account noted that the same tweet being deleted by a normal user and not from the profile of an influential personality reveals ‘double standard’ of acceptable behaviour on Twitter. However, @SuspendThePres still reportedly abstained from rating the behaviour of the social media website and said that Twitter along with other such platforms is currently facing an ‘unprecedented position’ which makes it further difficult to ‘pace and navigate’.
Updated 18:57 IST, June 10th 2020