Google has banned the right-wing social media app Parler from its Play Store for Android.
In a statement to Ars, Google said it was enforcing long-standing policies requiring that social media apps remove “egregious content like posts that incite violence.”
“We’re aware of continued posting in the Parler app that seeks to incite ongoing violence in the US,” a Google spokesman told Ars. “In light of this ongoing and urgent public safety threat, we are suspending the app’s listings from the Play Store until it addresses these issues.”
While Google didn’t specify which “posts that incite violence” it had in mind, a reasonable guess is that they’re related to Wednesday’s riot at the US Capitol that interrupted the certification of Joe Biden’s election as president. The riot occurred after President Donald Trump held a rally near the White House and urged his supporters to march on the Capitol.
Activists pointed to posts like this one on Parler that glorified Wednesday’s violence and vowed to commit more in the coming days.
Google’s Parler ban comes just as mainstream social media sites have banned a number of prominent right-wing figures. On Friday, Twitter banned President Trump and former associates Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell. The same day, Reddit banned one of its most popular pro-Trump subreddits.
Social media sites’ increasingly aggressive moderation efforts have caused some conservatives to look for alternatives, with Parler emerging as a popular choice. And Parler has leaned into its reputation as a right-wing alternative to Twitter. When I created a Parler account for myself on Friday evening, Parler recommended I follow conservative pundits and politicians like Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, and Devin Nunes. It also recommended the Parler accounts of conservative website PragerU and the Babylon Bee, an Onion competitor that caters to conservative sensibilities.
But if Parler isn’t available on the Android app store, that could limit its ability to attract new users. Parler’s growth will be hampered even further if Apple bans Parler from its own App Store. Parler CEO John Matze has told media outlets that Apple sent Parler a letter threatening to ban the app if it didn’t quickly change its moderation policies. But the changes Apple is demanding might conflict with the free speech philosophy that has made Parler attractive to conservatives in the first place.
In some ways, Parler is following in the footsteps of Gab, another right-leaning social network that has faced hostility from Apple and Google. Gab’s profile was raised in 2017 when well-known Internet trolls and neo-Nazis who had been kicked off of other platforms flocked to Gab. Apple rejected Gab from its App Store that year, and Google pulled the app from the Play Store after initially approving it. Both companies cited the app’s inadequate safeguards against hate speech. Gab eventually joined the open Mastodon social network, causing controversy there.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733992
Donald Trump has finally earned a permaban from Twitter
Aurich Lawson / Getty
Twitter has permanently suspended President Donald Trump’s personal Twitter account due to repeated incitement of violence, the company announced Friday night.
“After close review of recent Tweets from the @realDonaldTrump account and the context around them—specifically how they are being received and interpreted on and off Twitter—we have permanently suspended the account due to the risk of further incitement of violence,” Twitter said in a company blog post this evening.
On Wednesday, in the wake of the insurrectionist violence at the US Capitol, Twitter gave Trump a 12-hour suspension and required him to delete three tweets that it saw as continuing to promote, endorse, or glorify the violent event.
In its explanation, Twitter cited two of the tweets Trump posted Wednesday and said that the messages “must be read in the context of broader events in the country and the ways in which the President’s statements can be mobilized by different audiences, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behavior from this account in recent weeks.”
The 12-hour ban expired late Thursday, and on Friday morning Trump returned to the platform to tweet, “The 75,000,000 great American Patriots who voted for me, AMERICA FIRST, and MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN, will have a GIANT VOICE long into the future. They will not be disrespected or treated unfairly in any way, shape or form!!!”
In context, Twitter determined, that message once again comprises a call to violence and, in short, Trump broke that rule one too many times and earned the perma-boot.
This is at least the fourth platform ban Donald Trump has earned since Wednesday. Twitch, Snapchat, and Facebook (including Instagram) have all also suspended Trump “indefinitely.”
Twitter earlier today also suspended the accounts of several prominent Trump supporters, including Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell, as part of a push to deplatform Qanon.
Update, 8:40pm EST: Twitter said it would delete any attempts by Trump to circumvent his ban, and the company seems to have meant it. Trump took to the official presidential Twitter account, @POTUS, a little before 8:30pm to complain about his ban; the thread, as shown in a screenshot below, was deleted within a few minutes.
Trump is displeased.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733975
Michael Flynn and Sidney Powell banned from Twitter in QAnon purge
Twitter on Friday removed the accounts of several high-profile supporters of President Trump and the QAnon conspiracy theory. Targets included former Trump advisor Michael Flynn and former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell.
The rioters who broke into the Capitol on Wednesday were of course supporters of Donald Trump. Many were inspired by QAnon as well. The QAnon conspiracy theory centers around a supposed government insider who goes by “Q.” Members of this community have baselessly accused liberal leaders like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and George Soros of running a sex trafficking ring and attempting to organize a coup against President Trump.
These paranoid beliefs evidently inspired some QAnon enthusiasts to stage an attempted coup of their own on Wednesday, as supporters broke into the Capitol to attempt to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s election. Their actions led to the deaths of five people, including US Capitol Police Officer Brian Sicknick.
The incident apparently inspired Twitter’s leadership to take a harder line against prominent figures who have promoted these kinds of beliefs on Twitter.
Sidney Powell has spent the last two months promoting far-fetched claims about election fraud in the 2020 election. At one point, Powell claimed to have evidence that Democrats had used a computer program created by Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez and the Chinese Communist Party to steal votes in Georgia and other states.
Chavez has been dead since 2013 and Powell never produced evidence for these claims. Eventually, her claims got so outlandish that the Trump campaign dropped her from its legal team.
Election software vendor Dominion recently sued Powell for defamation after she repeatedly claimed that Dominion’s software had been used in this supposed vote-stealing scheme. In its lawsuit, Dominion said that Powell’s claims were based on “declarations from a motley crew of conspiracy theorists, con artists, armchair ‘experts,’ and anonymous sources who were judicially determined to be ‘wholly unreliable.'”
Flynn advocated a military takeover of the US
Michael Flynn advised Donald Trump on national security during the 2016 presidential election and briefly served as his National Security Advisor. However, he got into trouble for failing to disclose lobbying work for the Turkish government and for allegedly misleading Vice President Mike Pence about conversations he had with Russian ambassador Sergey Kislyak in the weeks after the 2016 presidential election. Trump fired him in February 2017. He then came under investigation from special counsel Robert Mueller, who pressured him to plead guilty in December 2017 to lying to the FBI.
In 2019, Flynn fired his previous attorneys and hired Powell. Powell went on Fox News to make the case for her client. In 2020, the Trump administration requested the dismissal of Flynn’s case. The judge overseeing the case was skeptical of the government’s request, but before the judge issued a ruling, Trump pardoned Flynn.
As the Daily Beast reported last month, Flynn is a prominent figure in the QAnon world:
His legal fund received proceeds from the sale of some pro-QAnon books by the conspiracy theory’s promoters—perhaps appropriately, as many QAnon believers think Flynn is secretly the mysterious “Q” dispensing the clues that make up the conspiracy theory. In July, Flynn repaid the favor and recorded himself taking a “QAnon oath” with members of his family.
QAnon podcasts have been a key part of Flynn’s outreach after evading his federal charge. On Dec. 2, Flynn appeared on the QAnon-affiliated “Bards of War” podcast, which is run by a man who would issue cryptic QAnon-style about the deep state. Flynn declared that the United States was on the brink of a socialist takeover.
Also in December, Flynn promoted a press release from an organization called the “We The People Convention” that declared last November’s election fraudulent and called on President Trump to “immediately declare a limited form of Martial Law, and temporarily suspend the Constitution and civilian control of these federal elections, for the sole purpose of having the military oversee a re-vote.”
In addition to Flynn and Powell, Twitter closed the account of Ron Watkins, the administrator of 8kun—formerly known as 8chan—and other QAnon-related accounts.
“The accounts have been suspended in line with our policy on Coordinated Harmful Activity,” Twitter said in a statement to NBC News. “We’ve been clear that we will take strong enforcement action on behavior that has the potential to lead to offline harm, and given the renewed potential for violence surrounding this type of behavior in the coming days, we will permanently suspend accounts that are solely dedicated to sharing QAnon content.”
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733933
Dominion Voting suing “kraken” lawyer Sidney Powell for $1.3B
Enlarge/ Sidney Powell, flanked by Rudy Giuliani, at a press conference on Nov. 19, three days before the Trump campaign publicly cut ties with her.
Dominion Voting Systems has filed a suit against former Trump campaign attorney Sidney Powell, alleging that her widespread, unfounded conspiracy theories led to both reputational damage to the company and death threats against its employees. Dominion is seeking $1.3 billion in damages.
Statements made by Powell, “in concert with allies and media outlets” presenting a “false preconceived narrative” about the 2020 election, caused “unprecedented harm” to Dominion, the company said in its suit (PDF).
Powell is the attorney who filed the “kraken” lawsuits seeking to de-certify the results of the 2020 election. The Trump campaign abruptly cut ties with Powell in late November, but that stopped neither her increasingly outrageous claims nor her increasingly ludicrous lawsuits from flowing. Not only were Powell’s suits based on unfounded conspiracy theories, but they were also just plain bad filings in myriad other ways, including naming locations that didn’t exist, misspelling ones that did, and naming plaintiffs who had not agreed to participate in the case.
There has been no occurrence or proof of widespread voter fraud in any state, but that has not stopped Trump allies from continuing to make false claims that the election was in some way “rigged.”
“Powell’s wild accusations are demonstrably false,” Dominion writes in the suit. “Far from being created in Venezuela to rig elections for a now-deceased Venezuelan dictator, Dominion was founded in Toronto for the purpose of creating a fully auditable paper-based vote system that would empower people with disabilities to vote independently on paper ballots.”
Among her many questionable assertions, Powell claimed in November that Dominion was “created to produce altered voting results in Venezuela for Hugo Chavez,” who died in 2013.
Dominion first warned back in December that it was planning defamation lawsuits, as it sent more than 20 letters to individuals and organizations, including Powell, demanding that they stop making defamatory claims about the company. Fox News, Newsmax, and OANN were all on the receiving end of Dominion’s warnings, as were Fox News hosts Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, and Maria Bartiromo; Newsmax host Greg Kelly; attorney Lin Wood; and Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani, among others.
Because of their defamatory claims, Dominion alleges, the company has had to spend more than $565,000 on private security forces for its employees since the election. An employee for the company filed a defamation suit against the Trump campaign, as well as Giuliani and Powell, in December in Colorado. That suit alleges that such false claims had led to the Dominion employee receiving death threats and going into hiding.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733896
FBI arrests Republican lawmaker who stormed Capitol with pro-Trump mob
Enlarge/ Derrick Evans shouts on his Facebook livestream as a mob enters the US Capitol.
Derrick Evans
The West Virginia state lawmaker who was part of a pro-Trump mob that stormed the US Capitol was arrested today and is being charged by federal authorities.
Derrick Evans, a newly elected Republican who was sworn in to the West Virginia House of Delegates last month, livestreamed himself on Facebook Wednesday as the mob broke into the Capitol. On Friday, Evans was “charged with entering a restricted area of the US Capitol,” the Associated Press reported, citing a Justice Department official.
“Ken Kohl, a top deputy federal prosecutor in Washington, announced the charge against Republican state Del. Derrick Evans on a call in which he presented dozens of new charges against members of the crowd that violently stormed the Capitol on Wednesday,” the AP wrote.
WSAZ reporter Chad Hendrick posted a video of Evans being taken into custody by FBI agents this afternoon:
#BREAKING WV Delegate Derrick Evans has been taken into federal custody.
He’s charged after allegedly entering a restricted area of the US Capitol with rioters Wednesday.
Law enforcement agencies have been examining social media posts to identify rioters, and Evans made it especially easy for authorities to identify him. While livestreaming himself, Evans yelled, “We’re in! We’re in! Derrick Evans is in the Capitol!” In another video he posted before storming the Capitol, he said, “Pray that the patriots, the constitutional-loving Americans, the people who are tired of liberals running this country and stealing elections, that they get off the couch and show up today in force and send a message.”
Evans’ actions drew condemnation from both Republican and Democratic officials in West Virginia. Evans claimed he “was simply there as an independent member of the media to film history,” and his lawyer said Evans would not resign from the state legislature.
“Evans’ lawyer had asserted in a statement Thursday that his client ‘had no choice but to enter’ the Capitol due to the size of the crowd he was in, and that, ‘It wasn’t apparent to Mr. Evans that he wasn’t allowed to follow the crowd into this public area of the Capitol, inside which members of the public were already located,'” according to CNN.
One of the other arrests announced today was of Richard Barnett, who posted a photo of himself in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office during the break-in. He was arrested in Arkansas.
“Just because you’ve left the DC region, you can still expect a knock at the door, if we find out you were part of the criminal activity at the Capitol,” FBI official Steven D’antuono said, according to Politico. “We are sparing no expense or personnel or effort to root those perpetrators out and find them.” There could also be arrests for thefts of laptops from the offices of congressmembers, including a laptop stolen from Pelosi’s office.
Listing image by Derrick Evans
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733904
Ajit Pai offers mild criticism of Trump incitement, drops Section 230 plan
Enlarge/ Ajit Pai backs slowly away from President Trump.
Federal Communications Commission Chairman Ajit Pai said he is dropping his plan to help President Trump impose a crackdown on social-media platforms and offered mild criticism of Trump’s incitement of a mob that stormed the US Capitol in a failed bid to overturn the election results.
In October, Pai backed Trump’s proposal to limit the Section 230 legal protections for social-media websites that block or modify content posted by users. At the time, Pai said he would open an FCC rule-making process to declare that companies like Twitter and Facebook do not have “special immunity” for their content-moderation decisions. But Pai hasn’t moved the proposal forward since Trump’s election loss and has now stated in an interview that he won’t finalize the plan.
“The status is that I do not intend to move forward with the notice of proposed rule-making [to reinterpret Section 230] at the FCC,” Pai said in an interview published yesterday by Protocol. “The reason is, in part, because given the results of the election, there’s simply not sufficient time to complete the administrative steps necessary in order to resolve the rule-making. Given that reality, I do not believe it’s appropriate to move forward.” Pai announced shortly after Trump’s election loss that he will leave the FCC on January 20, President-elect Joe Biden’s inauguration day.
Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act is a US law that says providers and users of interactive computer services shall not be held liable for “any action voluntarily taken in good faith to restrict access to or availability of material that the provider or user considers to be obscene, lewd, lascivious, filthy, excessively violent, harassing, or otherwise objectionable, whether or not such material is constitutionally protected.” Before abandoning his plan, Pai said that social-media companies “do not have a First Amendment right to a special immunity denied to other media outlets, such as newspapers and broadcasters,” but both conservative and liberal opponents of his plan said the FCC does not have constitutional authority to reinterpret the statute.
Pai: Seeking election reversal was “terrible mistake”
On Wednesday this week, as Congress met to certify Biden’s election win, the US Capitol was stormed by a mob incited by Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen from him. Trump used social media to spread his baseless claims, and his posting privileges were suspended by Facebook and Instagram, while Twitter removed several of this incendiary tweets. Trump had wanted the FCC to crack down on the social-media companies to prevent Facebook and Twitter from moderating his posts.
Protocol reporter Emily Birnbaum asked Pai if he thinks Trump “bears any responsibility” for the “violence and chaos [that] erupt[ed] on Capitol Hill, perpetuated by Trump supporters in his name.” Pai did not mention Trump by name in his response but said it was a “mistake” to suggest that the election results could be changed:
The scenes we saw yesterday were outrageous and extremely disappointing to those of us who cherish American democracy, one hallmark of which is the peaceful transition of power. To answer your question, I think it was a terrible mistake to suggest that the results of the election, and particularly the process that culminated yesterday in the Senate and the House, could in any way be changed. That was a terrible mistake and one that I do not think in any way should have been indulged.
Birnbaum pressed Pai for a more direct condemnation of Trump, asking, “Do you think that the president’s indulgence of those theories was in part responsible for what happened?” Pai’s response to this question focused on the rioters without mentioning Trump:
I haven’t studied all the statements that were made and actions that were taken. I was following it as closely as I could on television. But all I’ll say is, given the circumstances that we saw—armed guards defending the Senate chamber, people wielding Confederate flags in the seat of the United States government—it was completely unacceptable, completely outrageous. We must be governed by the rule of law, not by the rule of the mob. Law and order must be restored and democracy must be respected. Those are the bedrock expectations of every American citizen. It is what distinguishes democracy from other governments around the world. I believe that to my core, regardless of political affiliation or circumstance.
Pai still concerned about social-media moderation
Pai said he is still concerned about social-media moderation decisions and is open to new regulations. “What I will say is what I said [in] November of 2017, long before this was a dominant strain in the dominant discourse: Social media increasingly defines the public square when it comes to political speech,” Pai told Protocol. “We need more transparency and understanding how some of these decisions are made, how certain content is allowed or not allowed on these platforms.” Elected officials must consider that lack of transparency “as they’re thinking about whether and how to regulate social media companies,” Pai said.
Despite that, Pai did not criticize Facebook and Twitter for restricting Trump this week. When asked if he “agree[s] with Facebook and Twitter’s decision to pull the president off of social media,” Pai responded, “Given the circumstances we saw yesterday, I’m not going to second-guess those decisions.”
Although Democrats on the FCC opposed Pai’s Section 230 push, saying the commission shouldn’t become Trump’s “speech police,” Biden called for the repeal of Section 230 a year ago.
Pai expects Congress to take action. “There’s now a bipartisan consensus among elected officials that the law should be changed,” he said. “Obviously the president believes it should be repealed, President-elect Biden has campaigned repeatedly on its repeal, but within Congress there appears to be a consensus also that it should be revised or reformed in some way.” Pai said it is “a very complicated issue” and “I personally would think about it more carefully in terms of the immunity provision” but said the decision will rest with Congress and the Biden administration.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733764
“Baby-making machines”: Chinese tweet on Uighurs not against Twitter rules
Enlarge/ A woman is wearing a mask with the Uighur flag on it during the demonstration ‘Freedom for Uyghurs’ in The Hague, Netherlands on August 20, 2020.
Romy Arroyo Fernandez/NurPhoto via Getty Images
Twitter has told Ars Technica that a Chinese government tweet praising China’s treatment of its Uighur ethnic minority does not violate its policy against hateful conduct.
“Study shows that in the process of eradicating extremism, the minds of Uygur women in Xinjiang were emancipated and gender equality and reproductive health were promoted, making them no longer baby-making machines,” the tweet says. “They are more confident and independent.”
Human rights advocates have characterized China’s treatment of the Uighur people in the Xinjiang region of China as a demographic genocide. Here’s how the Associated Press described China’s approach last summer:
The state regularly subjects minority women to pregnancy checks, and forces intrauterine devices, sterilization and even abortion on hundreds of thousands, interviews and data show. Even while the use of IUDs and sterilization has fallen nationwide, it is rising sharply in Xinjiang.
The population control measures are backed by mass detention both as a threat and as a punishment for failure to comply. Having too many children is a major reason people are sent to detention camps, the AP found, with the parents of three or more ripped away from their families unless they can pay huge fines. Police raid homes, terrifying parents as they search for hidden children.
Thursday’s tweet from the Chinese Embassy in the United States links to an article in the China Daily, a publication of the Chinese Communist Party, that disputes these claims. The article claims that as China has eradicated “religious extremism” from the region, Uighur women have freely chosen to use birth control more, leading to a decline in birth rates in the region. It dismisses claims by “some Western scholars and politicians” that China has engaged in forced sterilizations of Uighurs.
Twitter regularly takes down content that violates its rules. Twitter’s rule against hateful conduct states that users “may not promote violence against or directly attack or threaten other people on the basis of race,” ethnicity, or religion. Users are also not allowed to “target individuals and groups with content intended to incite fear or spread fearful stereotypes about a protected category”—such as “all [religious group] are terrorists.”
Twitter also bans “the dehumanization of a group of people” based on their religion, race, or ethnicity.
On Thursday evening, I emailed Twitter to ask whether the tweet ran afoul of the rules. A Twitter spokesman quickly responded to say that it did not. “This Tweet is not in violation of our policies,” he wrote to Ars.
Twitter’s rules are vague enough that it’s hard to say for sure whether the tweet violates the letter of the policies. It doesn’t explicitly call for violence against the Uighur minority. Indeed, it insists that the Uighurs haven’t been victims of violence or dehumanization at all. At the same time, claiming that Uighur women were being held back by “extremist” views that turned them into “baby-making machines” does seem rather dehumanizing. And Twitter might want to take into account not only the literal words of the tweet but also the broader context of the Chinese government’s actions in the Xinjiang region.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733671
Boeing charged with fraud over 737 Max, fined more than $2.5 billion
Misleading federal regulators who were investigating not one but two plane crashes turns out to be a bad idea. On Thursday, the Department of Justice announced that Boeing has been charged with a conspiracy to defraud a government agency that was evaluating the company’s 737 Max airplane.
As a result of “misleading statements, half-truths, and omissions communicated by Boeing employees” to the Federal Aviation Authority’s Aircraft Evaluation Group, Boeing has agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion as part of a deferred prosecution agreement—that includes a criminal penalty of $243 million, $500 million to compensate the heirs of 346 crash victims, and $1.77 billion in compensation to Boeing’s airline customers.
When Boeing designed the 737 Max, it added larger turbofan engines than had been used on earlier 737 variants, which changed the aerodynamic characteristics of the plane compared to older models. Rather than making pilots certify on a new type, Boeing used MCAS to allow the 737 Max to mimic the handling of previous 737s. Tragically, MCAS wasn’t nearly as safe as Boeing claimed, and a safety feature that would alert pilots to a potential sensor disagreement was an optional extra, one that neither Lion Air nor Ethiopian Airlines had purchased.
“This case sends a clear message: the Department of Justice will hold manufacturers like Boeing accountable for defrauding regulators—especially in industries where the stakes are this high,” said US Attorney Erin Nealy Cox for the Northern District of Texas in a press release.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733603
DoJ says SolarWinds hackers breached its Office 365 system and read email
The US Justice Department has become the latest federal agency to say its network was breached in a long and wide-ranging hack campaign that’s believed to have been backed by the Russian government.
In a terse statement issued Wednesday, Justice Department spokesman Marc Raimondi said that the breach wasn’t discovered until December 24, which is nine days after the hack campaign came to light. The hackers, Raimondi said, took control of the department’s Office 365 system and accessed email sent or received from about 3 percent of accounts. The department has more than 100,000 employees.
Investigators believe the campaign started when the hackers took control of the software distribution platform of SolarWinds, an Austin, Texas-based maker of network management software that’s used by hundreds of thousands of organizations. The attackers then pushed out a malicious update that was installed by about 18,000 of those customers. Only a fraction of the 18,000 customers received a follow-on attack that used the backdoored SolarWinds software to view, delete, or alter data stored on those networks.
So far, about a half-dozen federal agencies have said they were among those singled out. Private companies including Microsoft and security firm FireEye have also said they were part of this group.
On Tuesday, officials with the National Security Agency, FBI, Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, and Office of the Director of National Intelligence issued a joint statement saying that the Kremlin was ”likely” behind the hack, which began no later than October 2019.
Wednesday’s statement said that investigators have no indication that the department’s classified network has been breached. While that’s good news, sensitive information routinely flows through non-classified systems.
A second software maker investigated
While SolarWinds software has been widely suspected as the initial way hackers got in, The New York Times on Wednesday reported that investigators are examining the role another software supplier, JetBrains, may have played. The company, which was founded by three Russian engineers in the Czech Republic, makes a tool called TeamCity that helps developers test and manage software code. TeamCity is used by developers at 300,000 organizations, including SolarWinds and 79 of the Fortune 100 companies.
The Wall Street Journal reported that investigators believe the hackers gained access to a TeamCity server used by SolarWinds but that it was unclear how the system was accessed. In a statement, JetBrains co-CEO Maxim Shafirov said it hasn’t been contacted by SolarWinds or any government agency about any role TeamCity may have played.
https://arstechnica.com/?p=1733391
Twitter, Facebook give Trump temp bans after insurrectionists storm Capitol [Updated]
Enlarge/ Supporters of US President Donald Trump breach the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, in Washington, DC.
Update, 8:40pm EST: Facebook has now suspended Trump from posting on its site for the next 24 hours, Axios reports.
The company also said in a blog post that it would be searching for and removing any content across both Facebook and Instagram in support of the violence at the Capitol today, as well as “attempts to restage violence tomorrow or in the coming days.”
Update, 7:10pm EST: At 6:30, Twitter began removing several of President Trump’s tweets, including the video statement.
Enlarge/ A screenshot of Trump’s account with offending tweets removed.
“As a result of the unprecedented and ongoing violent situation in Washington, DC, we have required the removal of three @realDonaldTrump Tweets that were posted earlier today for repated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy,” the company said. “This means that the account of @realDonaldTrump will be locked for 12 hours following the removal of these Tweets. If the Tweets are not removed, the account will remain locked.”
Twitter also shot a clear warning across the president’s bow, adding, “Future violations of the Twitter Rules, including our Civic Integrity or Violent Threats policies, will result in permanent suspension of the @realDonaldTrump account. Our public interest policy—which has guided our enforcement action in this area for years—ends where we believe the risk of harm is higher and/or more severe.”
Update, 6:00pm EST: Facebook removed from its platform a short video statement made by President Donald Trump about the violence in the District of Columbia today. In the video, the president told his supporters to “go home now,” while also continuing to offer sympathy to the rioters and repeated the lie that the election was “fraudulent” and “stolen.”
“This is an emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump’s video,” Facebook VP of integrity Guy Rosen said. “We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence.”
YouTube also removed Trump’s video from its service, according to a report from The Verge.
The video was also posted to Twitter, which left it up with a message appended saying, “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence.”
Original story 4:35pm EST: A growing chorus of groups and individuals are calling on Twitter to suspend President Donald Trump’s account as a mob of his supporters has stormed and occupied the US Capitol, sending members of Congress fleeing the session during which they were meant to be certifying the results of the 2020 presidential election.
Several groups of Trump supporters planned for weeks to meet in Washington, DC, today for a “Stop the Steal” rally to protest the results of the 2020 election and demand that Trump be found the winner instead of actual President-elect Joe Biden, who won both the popular vote and Electoral College.
Trump spoke to the crowd as Congress convened to begin formally certifying the electoral college votes. In his speech, Trump vowed to “never concede,” adding, “It will never happen. You don’t concede when there’s death involved. Our country has had enough. We will not take it anymore.”
A short time later, rioters stormed the Capitol, resulting in the evacuation of Congress. The situation at the Capitol is very much both ongoing and chaotic at the moment.
While President-elect Biden took to the airwaves in the 3pm EST hour to ask Trump to condemn the violence, Trump himself continues only to speak through Twitter.
At 2:24pm, during the height of the chaos, Trump pinned the blame on Vice President Mike Pence, who Trump repeatedly urged to find a way to invalidate the results of the election. “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify,” Trump wrote. “USA demands the truth!”
Twitter appended a label to the tweet, saying, “This claim of election fraud is disputed, and this Tweet can’t be replied to, retweeted, or liked due to a risk of violence.”
“Extremists must be taken at their word”
The violence, however, was already well underway, and several Twitter users immediately called on company CEO Jack Dorsey to take stronger action against the president’s account.
“Extremists must be taken at their word,” Anti-Defamation League CEO Jonathan Greenblatt said in a written statement. “First there was volatile rhetoric online, then explicit calls to violence and now people are acting on those calls in the nation’s capital and flagrantly breaking the law. It must end now. The President has promoted sedition and incited violence… social media companies should suspend his accounts ASAP as they would do for anyone else advocating disinformation and promoting violence. It’s time.”
Hundreds of Twitter users have been using that platform to echo the call. “Let me say in no uncertain terms [Jack]: If you do not suspend Donald Trump’s Twitter account for the next day at least, this mob attack on Congress is also on you,” New York Times technology reporter Kara Swisher wrote, tagging Dorsey as well as other Twitter Safety executives. “Sorry, but he has incited violence for days, using your tools in large part and you need to act now. This is about public safety and the safety of those trapped in Congress now. He has no part in calming down the mob he incited—this will be up to the police and the National Guard.”
Twitter issued a statement saying, “In regard to the ongoing situation in Washington, DC, Twitter’s Trust & Safety teams are working to protect the public conversation occurring on the service and will take action on any content that violates the Twitter Rules. Let us be clear: Threats of and calls to violence have no place on Twitter, and we will enforce our policies accordingly.”
