On Friday evening, Twitter announced that they had suspended President Donald Trump’s account for intensifying violence.
Twitter suspends Donald Trump’s account.
After the Capitol attack, where Trump supporters stormed inside the building, Trump’s tweets violated the company’s policy against the glorification of violence.
“These two Tweets must be read in the context of broader events in the country and how different audiences can mobilize the President’s statements, including to incite violence, as well as in the context of the pattern of behaviour from this account in recent weeks,” Twitter said. The first tweet addressed Trump’s supporters, while the second indicated that Trump did not plan to attend Joe Biden’s inauguration.
Several fans, friends, and family members of Donald Trump displayed their objection to twitter’s act and trashed the company. After the President’s suspension, fans stated that they would move on as well. “Goodbye Twitter” became a trend on Saturday morning while other websites, such as Parler, saw an increase in users’ numbers.
Parler crashed, likely because the influx of new users overwhelmed their servers. The outage continued for less than an hour. According to CNN , even before the current uproar, the platform was famous among conservatives.
Twitter, on the other hand, witnessed its shares go down around 12% on Monday. After closing at $51.48 per share on Friday, the US-based social networking service observed its stock price open down at $47.16 a share on Monday, which then fell to as low as $45.15 per share shortly after opening bell at 9.30 a.m. on the US East Coast (1430GMT).
Twitter and its clash with the U.S
Removing its 6th most popular account – with 88 million followers- Twitter had to foretell the negative results of their action.
They, however, weren’t the only ones to imply this. It was followed by other major social networking firms such as Youtube, Twitch, Instagram, and Facebook. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned in his tweet that Donald Trump’s account would be suspended until January 20th in an attempt to assure that the remaining 13 days and the days subsequent to the inauguration pass peacefully and per established democratic norms. Facebook also experienced a $60 billion erase in its value in two days.
A reason twitter’s stocks decreased was the fear by investors that suspension would lead to a decrease in interest in the social media platform and cause boycotts from those who believe that the decision was a political act to silence the voices of prominent conservatives.
The decline erased $5 billion from Twitter’s market capitalization before the stock price later recovered to $49 per share around 12.20 p.m. (1720GMT) for a market value of approximately $39 billion.
The debate over whether this decision of banning Trump from social networking sites was justified morally, and beneficial practically continues as netizens share their opinions over the matter.
