This Account That Only Tweets What Donald Trump Tweets Was Suspended After 3 Days

Donald Trump is constantly tweeting inflammatory things that, if it were anyone else tweeting them, would most likely get the user suspended or outright banned from the site–a fact that was just proven by an account called @SuspendThePres.

The account launched on May 29th as a “Twitter experiment,” according to its bio. “I tweet what the President tweets. Will Twitter suspend my account? Please report my rule violating tweets. Please share this experiment.”

SuspendThePres tweeted everything Donald Trump tweeted. It only took three days for Twitter issue a 12-hour suspension. Unsurprisingly, the offending tweet was the same one that got Trump his first-ever flagging on the site for “glorifying violence.”

SuspendThePres was informed that the tweet violated Twitter’s terms, which prohibits “content that condones or celebrates acts of violence that could promote imitation of the act.” You would think that a tweet from the president would be more at risk of promoting imitation than a bot account, but here we are.

The account’s creator, who tweets under the handle @BizarreLazar, says he understands this is “a very difficult space to navigate” and that he doesn’t necessarily “think Twitter is right or wrong in how they are approaching the subject.”

On the one hand, Trump should be held to the same community standards as everyone else on the site. But there is an argument to be made that, as @BizarreLazar writes, “you have accounts of such importance historically speaking that to block or otherwise suspend would be an even bigger problem.” If a world leader is using Twitter to announce policies and to make threats, how do you hide that from the world?

There aren’t any easy answers here, just a lot of terrible.

@SuspendthePres is already back from its suspension and continuing on with the experiment.

(image: Alex Wong/Getty Images)
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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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